THE AMERICAN
there understood if he was n't mistaken, which seemed squeezeable into a couple of rooms of that inconvenient and ill-warmed house: all with nothing worse to brood about, when necessary, than the mystery perhaps of the happiness that would so queerly have come to her. To some perception of his view and his judgement, and of the patience with which he was prepared to insist on them, he fondly believed himself to be day by day bringing her round. She might n't, she could n't yet, no doubt, wholly fall in with them, but she saw, he made out, that he had built a bridge which would bear the very greatest weight she should throw on it, and it was for him often, all charmingly, as if she were admiring from this side and that the bold span of arch and the high line of the parapet—as if indeed on occasion she stood straight there at the spring, just watching him at his extremity and with nothing, when the hour should strike, to prevent her crossing with a rush.
He often spent an evening's end, when she had so appointed—her motives and her method and her logic being meanwhile something of her own, though something thus beautifully between them, even if never named, and which he would n't for the world have asked her to name—he often passed a stiff succession of minutes at the somewhat chill fireside of Madame de Bellegarde; contenting himself there for the most part with looking across the room, through narrowed eyelids, at his mistress, who always made a point, before her family, of talking to some one else. Her mother, on that scene, would sit by the fire conversing neatly and coldly with
245
