The question had the tenderest directness, but once more, for a minute, their common understanding of it, and Molly's own not least, seemed to lapse--his sense was touched by that strange convergent wait. He truly could thus, he should have felt, know at least by renewed experience what it was to feel them united in blankness, make free as he might with those other vanities. It was in the nature of these surprises of their collected wit to be blest in proportion as they were brief, however--and this even though they suggested to him while lasting the question of what would become of him, what would become of all of them, if they did last more than they should. The break was somehow better as coming, if possible, from one of themselves--and now he knew, probably indeed very soon, that it had come in the form of an inquiry of Mrs. Midmore's, made in all gentleness and elegance. "Why is it, please, that you provide so for our hating you? It sounds so dreadfully as if you knew something----!" She pulled up, her words expired, and it was for an instant as if the high and handsome lady, the pitch and sound of whose presence he had so begun with enjoying, had shrunken to a pale, pleading, pathetic person, a person engaged for a moment in the fantastic act of trying to buy him off by conciliation. He had a glimpse of something stranger than any conceivable expression of it--of the possibility, that is, of a fear in her of being frightened, with its instinct of gaining time before the danger increased. She smiled a bit convulsively again--she had done so some moments before; but good it was at once withal that the very delicacy of her dread or her desire could make him glow as with foreseeing pity, another throb of the same queer kindness that had stirred him a while back. Yes, yes, he himself shouldn't have cared to apprehend what she apprehended, however the particular point of it might show; and why accordingly _shouldn't_ one be in horror and in pity of contributing to an alarm so gratuitous or in fact, as they said, so false? It was true at the same time indeed that there was no answer to her last imputation which wouldn't leave him still rather more staring at it for himself than brushing it away for her: which was the sense in fact in which he promptly enough replied.