Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/274

THE GOLDEN BOWL him nothing might have been: which would have been missing least of all. "I guess I've never been jealous," he finally remarked. And it said more to her, he had occasion next to perceive, than he was intending; for it made her, as by the pressure of a spring, give him a look that seemed to tell of things she couldn't speak.

But she at last tried for one of them. "Oh it's you, father, who are what I call beyond everything. Nothing can pull you down."

He returned the look as with the sociability of their easy communion, though inevitably throwing in this time a shade of solemnity. He might have been seeing things to say and others, whether of a type presumptuous or not, doubtless better kept back. So he settled on the merely obvious. "Well then we make a pair. We're all right."

"Oh we're all right!" A declaration launched not only with all her discriminating emphasis, but confirmed by her rising with decision and standing there as if the object of their small excursion required accordingly no further pursuit. At this juncture, however—with the act of their crossing the bar to get, as might be, into port—there occurred the only approach to a betrayal of their having had to beat against the wind. Her father kept his place, and it was as if she had got over first and were pausing for her consort to follow. If they were all right, they were all right; yet he seemed to hesitate and wait for some word beyond. His eyes met her own suggestively, and it was only after she had contented herself with simply smiling at him, smiling ever so 264