“They were never really shut. She misses him.”
“Then why hasn’t she missed him before?”
Well, facing him there, among their domestic glooms and glints, Fanny worked it out. “She did—but she wouldn’t let herself know it. She had her reason—she wore her blind. Now, at last, her situation has come to a head. To-day she does know it. And that’s illuminating. It has been,” Mrs. Assingham wound up, “illuminating to ME.”
Her husband attended, but the momentary effect of his attention was vagueness again, and the refuge of his vagueness was a gasp. “Poor dear little girl!”
“Ah no—don’t pity her!”
This did, however, pull him up. “We mayn’t even be sorry for her?”
“Not now—or at least not yet. It’s too soon—that is if it isn’t very much too late. This will depend,” Mrs. Assingham went on; “at any rate we shall see. We might have pitied her before—for all the good it would then have done her; we might have begun some time ago. Now, however, she has begun to live. And the way it comes to me, the way it comes to me—” But again she projected her vision.
“The way it comes to you can scarcely be that she’ll like it!”
“The way it comes to me is that she will live. The way it comes to me is that she’ll triumph.”
She said this with so sudden a prophetic flare that it fairly cheered her husband. “Ah then, we must back her!”