They remained for some minutes looking at it through the dim window which opened upon the world of human trouble in general and which let the vague light play here and there upon gilt and crystal and colour, the florid features, looming dimly, of Fanny's drawing-room.

And the beauty of what thus passed between them, passed with her cry of pain, with her burst of tears, with his wonderment and his kindness and his comfort, with the moments of their silence, above all, which might have represented their sinking together, hand in hand, for a time, into the mystic lake where he had begun, as we have hinted, by seeing her paddle alone--the beauty of it was that they now could really talk better than before, because the basis had at last, once for all, defined itself.
What was the basis, which Fanny absolutely exacted, but that Charlotte and the Prince must be saved--so far as consistently speaking of them as still safe might save them?
It did save them, somehow, for Fanny's troubled mind--for that was the nature of the mind of women.

He conveyed to her now, at all events, by refusing her no gentleness, that he had sufficiently got the tip, and that the tip was all he had wanted.

This remained quite clear even when he presently reverted to what she had told him of her recent passage with Maggie.

"I don't altogether see, you know, what you infer from it, or why you infer anything." When he so expressed himself it was quite as if in possession of what they had brought up from the depths.
XXIV "I can't say more," this made his companion reply, "than that something in her face, her voice and her whole manner acted upon me as nothing in her had ever acted before; and just for the reason, above all, that I felt her trying her very best--and her very best, poor duck, is very good--to be quiet and natural.