She had done for him, that is, what her instinct enjoined; had laid a basis not merely momentary on which he could meet her.

When, by the turn of his head, he did finally meet her, this was the last thing that glimmered out of his look; but it came into sight, none the less, as a perception of his distress and almost as a question of his eyes; so that, for still another minute, before he committed himself, there occurred between them a kind of unprecedented moral exchange over which her superior lucidity presided.

It was not, however, that when he did commit himself the show was promptly portentous.

"But what in the world has Fanny Assingham had to do with it ?" She could verily, out of all her smothered soreness, almost have smiled: his question so affected her as giving the whole thing up to her.

But it left her only to go the straighter.