The more she thought, at present, of the tone he had employed to express their enjoyment of this resource, the more it came back to her as the product of a conscious art of dealing with her.

He had been conscious, at the moment, of many things--conscious even, not a little, of desiring; and thereby of needing, to see what she would do in a given case.

The given case would be that of her being to a certain extent, as she might fairly make it out, MENACED--horrible as it was to impute to him any intention represented by such a word.

Why it was that to speak of making her stepmother intervene, as they might call it, in a question that seemed, just then and there, quite peculiarly their own business--why it was that a turn so familiar and so easy should, at the worst, strike her as charged with the spirit of a threat, was an oddity disconnected, for her, temporarily, from its grounds, the adventure of an imagination within her that possibly had lost its way.

That, precisely, was doubtless why she had learned to wait, as the weeks passed by, with a fair, or rather indeed with an excessive, imitation of resumed serenity.