“Safely as regards being thrown with him perhaps after all, in such a case, too long.  He’s a person to think you might easily feel yourself to be.  So it won’t,” Maggie said, “come from father.  He’s too modest.”

Their eyes continued to meet on it, from corner to corner of the brougham.  “Oh your modesty, between you—!” But he still smiled for it.  “So that unless I insist—?”

“We shall simply go on as we are.”

“Well, we’re going on beautifully,” he answered—­though by no means with the effect it would have had if their mute transaction, that of attempted capture and achieved escape, had not taken place.  As Maggie said nothing, none the less, to gainsay his remark, it was open to him to find himself the next moment conscious of still another idea.  “I wonder if it would do.  I mean for me to break in.”

“’To break in’—?”

“Between your father and his wife.  But there would be a way,” he said—­“we can make Charlotte ask him.”  And then as Maggie herself now wondered, echoing it again:  “We can suggest to her to suggest to him that he shall let me take him off.”

“Oh!” said Maggie.

“Then if he asks her why I so suddenly break out she’ll be able to tell him the reason.”

They were stopping, and the footman, who had alighted, had rung at the house-door.  “That you think it would be so charming?”

“That I think it would be so charming.  That we’ve persuaded her will be convincing.”

“I see,” Maggie went on while the footman came back to let them out.  “I see,” she said again; though she felt a little disconcerted.  What she really saw, of a sudden, was that her stepmother might report her as above all concerned for the proposal, and this brought her back her need that her father shouldn’t think her concerned in any degree for anything.  She alighted the next instant with a slight sense of defeat; her husband, to let her out, had passed before her, and, a little in advance, he awaited her on the edge of the low terrace, a step high, that preceded their open entrance, on either side of which one of their servants stood.  The sense of a life tremendously ordered and fixed rose before her, and there was something in Amerigo’s very face, while his eyes again met her own through the dusky lamplight, that was like a conscious reminder of it.  He had answered her, just before, distinctly, and it appeared to leave her nothing to say.  It was almost as if, having planned for the last word, she saw him himself enjoying it.  It was almost as if—­in the strangest way in the world—­he were paying her back, by the production of a small pang, that of a new uneasiness, for the way she had slipped from him during their drive.

XXVIII