brevity of a sign that
they hadn't closed in for idle words, just as her dim, serious face,
uninterruptedly presented until they moved again, might have represented
the success with which she watched all her message penetrate. They
presently went back the way she had come, but she stopped Maggie again
within range of the smoking-room window and made her stand where the
party at cards would be before her. Side by side, for three minutes,
they fixed this picture of quiet harmonies, the positive charm of it
and, as might have been said, the full significance--which, as was now
brought home to Maggie, could be no more, after all, than a matter of
interpretation, differing always for a different interpreter. As she
herself had hovered in sight of it a quarter-of-an-hour before, it would
have been a thing for her to show Charlotte--to show in righteous irony,
in reproach too stern for anything but silence. But now it was she
who was being shown it, and shown it by Charlotte, and she saw quickly
enough that, as Charlotte showed it, so she must at present submissively
seem to take it.

The others were absorbed and unconscious, either silent over their game
or dropping remarks unheard on the terrace; and it was to her father's
quiet face, discernibly expressive of nothing that was in his daughter's
mind, that our young woman's attention was most directly given. His wife
and his daughter were both closely watching him, and to which of them,
could he have been notified of this, would his raised eyes first, all
impulsively, have responded; in which of them would he have felt it most
important to destroy--for HIS clutch at the equilibrium--any germ of
uneasiness? Not yet, since his marriage, had Maggie so sharply and
so formidably known her old possession of him as a thing divided
and contested. She was looking at him by Charlotte's leave and under
Charlotte's direction; quite in fact as if the particular way she should
look at him were prescribed to her; quite, even, as if she had been
defied to look at him in any other. It came home to her too that
the challenge wasn't, as might be said, in his interest and for his
protection, but, pressingly, insistently, in Charlotte's, for that of
HER security at any price. She might verily, by this dumb demonstration,
have been naming to Maggie the price, naming it as a question for Maggie
herself, a sum of money that she, properly, was to find. She must remain
safe and Maggie must pay--what s