This familiar pleasantry seemed to desire to show it could yield, on occasion, to any clear trouble; though it was also sensibly, and just incoherently, in the air that no trouble was at present to be vulgarly recognised as clear.
There might, for that matter, even have been in Mr.Assingham's face a mild perception of some finer sense--a sense for his wife's situation, and the very situation she was, oddly enough, about to repudiate--that she had fairly caused to grow in him.

But it was a flower to breathe upon gently, and this was very much what she finally did.

She knew he needed no telling that she had given herself, all the afternoon, to her friends in Eaton Square, and that her doing so would have been but the prompt result of impressions gathered, in quantities, in brimming baskets, like the purple grapes of the vintage, at Matcham; a process surrounded by him, while it so unmistakably went on, with abstentions and discretions that might almost have counted as solemnities.

The solemnities, at the same time, had committed him to nothing--to nothing beyond this confession itself of a consciousness of deep waters.

She had been out on these waters, for him, visibly; and his tribute to the fact had been his keeping her, even if without a word, well in sight.