Mudge believed in her with a belief—!  She believed in herself too, for that matter:  if there was a thing in the world no one could charge her with it was being the kind of low barmaid person who rinsed tumblers and bandied slang.  But she forbore as yet to speak; she had not spoken even to Mrs. Jordan; and the hush that on her lips surrounded the Captain’s name maintained itself as a kind of symbol of the success that, up to this time, had attended something or other—­she couldn’t have said what—­that she humoured herself with calling, without words, her relation with him.

CHAPTER XI

She would have admitted indeed that it consisted of little more than the fact that his absences, however frequent and however long, always ended with his turning up again.  It was nobody’s business in the world but her own if that fact continued to be enough for her.  It was of course not enough just in itself; what it had taken on to make it so was the extraordinary possession of the elements of his life that memory and attention had at last given her.  There came a day when this possession on the girl’s part actually seemed to enjoy between them, while their eyes met, a tacit recognition that was half a joke and half a deep solemnity.  He bade her good morning always now; he often quite raised his hat to her.  He passed a remark when there was time or room, and once she went so far as to say to him that she hadn’t seen him for “ages.”  “Ages” was the word she consciously and carefully, though a trifle tremulously used; “ages” was exactly what she meant.  To this he replied in terms doubtless less anxiously selected, but perhaps on that account not the less remarkable, “Oh yes, hasn’t it been awfully wet?” That was a specimen of their give and take; it fed her fancy that no form of intercourse so transcendent and distilled had ever been established on earth.  Everything, so far as they chose to consider it so, might mean almost anything.  The want of margin in the cage, when he peeped through the bars, wholly ceased to be appreciable.  It was a drawback only in superficial commerce.  With Captain Everard she had simply the margin of the universe.  It may be imagined therefore how their unuttered reference to all she knew about him could in this immensity play at its ease.  Every time he handed in a telegram it was an addition to her knowledge:  what did his constant smile mean to mark if it didn’t mean to mark that?  He never came into the place without saying to her in this manner:  “Oh yes, you have me by this time so completely at your mercy that it doesn’t in the least matter what I give you now.  You’ve become a comfort, I assure you!”