Thair, alone, had given her the sense of an outsider. If he were in the midst of it as much as any one, it didn’t touch him. The very perfection of his manner, meeting those anxious, studying looks Mrs. Budd threw at him, was assurance that he knew his uneasy place in her conjecture. To Florence he had been, with his unconcern, like fresh air in a close room. He perfectly understood; and he took it easily. Their tacit understanding was the only note of confidence in the unquiet house. She knew he knew to a certain point just how she stood; but that point was the turn where she had let Longacre go. Just how far Thair missed this, she had read in his kind, congratulatory looks at her—his odd, half-protecting air of seeming to ease her off, as much as possible, from the strain, the reiterant conflict of mother and daughter, as from something quite beside her interest. He had never had so much that air to her as now, this afternoon, when he encountered her stepping through the tall French window upon the veranda, and turned and lifted the passion-vines for her to pass under—such a pretty thing, she thought, for a man to do for a woman as old, as haggard, as self-absorbed as she. They went the length of the fennel walk together. She remembered the morning when Longacre had left Julia so impetuously to follow her as something that had happened a very long time ago—something into which Thair’s voice dropped sharply, shattering the image. “We are to be abandoned,” he was saying. “The young madam is leaving us for town.” She stood, looking over the sun-drenched terraces. The thing had come on her so suddenly! She had lost her chance! She put her hand to her forehead. This would be the end! The thing would just fall to pieces by itself! Then the lasting silence got her, and she looked at Thair. He was looking at her. “What is the matter?” that look was saying. “Isn’t it all right? Aren’t you glad? Wasn’t it that that you wanted?” Her reply was just her look of despair. “What _can_ I do!” She might as well have said it out. It was so clear between them that his answering her with words seemed quite natural. “Can _I_ do anything?” She looked away from him to that glittering spot where the sun struck the sea. Why, there was only _one_ thing any one could do, so elemental that it took this sharp necessity to make it possible. She saw now. It was, all along, the only thing she could have done. She turned back to Thair, whose last question hung, waiting her answer. “No, nothing—you’re good—not now—except let me go back alone!”