Presently in fact, when four or five minutes had elapsed, it was as if she positively, hadn't so much even as that one.

He gave her back her paper, asking with it if there were anything in particular she wished him to do.
She stood there with her eyes on him, doubling the telegram together as if it had been a precious thing and yet all the while holding her breath.

Of a sudden, somehow, and quite as by the action of their merely having between them these few written words, an extraordinary fact came up.

He was with her as if he were hers, hers in a degree and on a scale, with an intensity and an intimacy, that were a new and a strange quantity, that were like the irruption of a tide loosening them where they had stuck and making them feel they floated.

What was it that, with the rush of this, just kept her from putting out her hands to him, from catching at him as, in the other time, with the superficial impetus he and Charlotte had privately conspired to impart, she had so often, her breath failing her, known the impulse to catch at her father?
She did, however, just yet, nothing inconsequent--though she couldn't immediately have said what saved her; and by the time she had neatly folded her telegram she was doing something merely needful.