his elder and his younger companion, with the latter of whom he had taken the tone that they were introducing Granddaddy, Granddaddy nervous and rather funking it, to lions and tigers more or less at large.  Touch by touch she thus dropped into her husband’s silence the truth about his good nature and his good manners; and it was this demonstration of his virtue, precisely, that added to the strangeness, even for herself, of her failing as yet to yield to him.  It would be a question but of the most trivial act of surrender, the vibration of a nerve, the mere movement of a muscle; but the act grew important between them just through her doing perceptibly nothing, nothing but talk in the very tone that would naturally have swept her into tenderness.  She knew more and more—­every lapsing minute taught her—­how he might by a single rightness make her cease to watch him; that rightness, a million miles removed from the queer actual, falling so short, which would consist of his breaking out to her diviningly, indulgently, with the last happy inconsequence.  “Come away with me, somewhere, you—­and then we needn’t think, we needn’t even talk, of anything, of anyone else:”  five words like that would answer her, would break her utterly down.  But they were the only ones that would so serve.  She waited for them, and there was a supreme instant when, by the testimony of all the rest of him, she seemed to feel them in his heart and on his lips; only they didn’t sound, and as that made her wait again so it made her more intensely watch.  This in turn showed her that he too watched and waited, and how much he had expected something that he now felt wouldn’t come.  Yes, it wouldn’t come if he didn’t answer her, if he but said the wrong things instead of the right.  If he could say the right everything would come—­it hung by a hair that everything might crystallise for their recovered happiness at his touch.  This possibility glowed at her, however, for fifty seconds, only then to turn cold, and as it fell away from her she felt the chill of reality and knew again, all but pressed to his heart and with his breath upon her cheek, the slim rigour of her attitude, a rigour beyond that of her natural being.  They had silences, at last, that were almost crudities of mutual resistance—­silences that persisted through his felt effort to treat her recurrence to the part he had lately played, to interpret all the sweetness of her so talking to him, as a manner of making love to him.  Ah, it was no such manner, heaven knew, for Maggie; she could make love, if this had been in question, better than that!  On top of which it came to her presently to say, keeping in with what she had already spoken:  “Except of course that, for the question of going off somewhere, he’d go readily, quite delightedly, with you.  I verily believe he’d like to have you for a while to himself.”

“Do you mean he thinks of proposing it?” the Prince after a moment sounded.