it came to that! – her steady view, clear from the first, of the beauty of her companion’s motive. It was like a fresh sacrifice for a larger conquest – ‘Only see me through now, do it in the face of this and in spite of it, and I leave you a hand of which the freedom isn’t to be said!’ The aggravation of fear – or call it apparently of knowledge – had jumped straight into its place as an aggravation above all for her father; the effect of this being but to quicken to passion her reasons for making his protectedness, or in other words the forms of his ignorance, still the law of her attitude and the key to her solution. She kept as tight hold of these reasons and these forms, in her confirmed horror, as the rider of a plunging horse grasps his seat with his knees and she might absolutely have been putting it to her guest that she believed she could stay on if they should only ‘meet’ nothing more. Though ignorant still of what she had definitely met Fanny yearned, within, over her spirit; and so, no word about it said, passed, through mere pitying eyes, a vow to walk ahead and, at cross-roads, with a lantern for the darkness and wavings-away for unadvised traffic, look out for alarms. There was accordingly no wait in Maggie’s reply. ‘They spent together hours – spent at least a morning – the certainty of which has come back to me now, but that I didn’t dream of at the time. That cup there has turned witness – by the most wonderful of chances. That’s why, since it has been here, I’ve stood it out for my husband to see; put it where it would meet him almost immediately if he should come into the room. I’ve wanted it to meet him,’ she went on, ‘and I’ve wanted him to meet it, and to be myself present at the meeting. But that hasn’t taken place as yet; often as he has lately been in the way of coming to see me here – yes in particular lately – he hasn’t showed to-day.’ It was with her managed quietness more and more that she talked – an achieved coherence that helped her evidently to hear and to watch herself; there was support, and thereby an awful harmony, but which meant a further guidance, in the facts she could add together. ‘It’s quite as if he had an instinct – something that has warned him off or made him uneasy. He doesn’t understand, naturally, what has happened, but guesses, with his beautiful cleverness, that something has, and isn’t in a hurry to be confronted with it. So in his vague fear he keeps off.’
‘But being meanwhile in the house –?’
‘I’ve no idea – not having seen him to-day, by exception, since before luncheon. He spoke to me then,’ the Princess freely explained, ‘of a ballot, of great importance, at a club – for somebody, some personal friend, I think, who’s coming up and is supposed to be in danger. To make an effort for him he thought he had better lunch there. You see the efforts he can make’ – for which Maggie found a smile that went to her friend’s heart. ‘He’s in so many ways the kindest of men. But it was hours ago.’
Mrs Assingham thought. ‘The more danger then of his coming in and finding me here. I don’t know, you see, what you now consider that you’ve ascertained; nor anything of the connexion with it of that object that you declare so damning.’ Her eyes rested on this odd acquisition and then quitted it, went back to it and again turned from it: it was inscrutable in its rather stupid elegance, and yet, from the moment one had thus appraised it, vivid and definite in its domination of the scene. Fanny could no more overlook it now than she could have overlooked a lighted Christmas-tree; but nervously and all in vain she dipped into her mind for some floating reminiscence of it. At the same time that this attempt left her blank she understood a good deal, she even not a little shared, the Prince’s mystic apprehension. The golden bowl put on, under consideration, a sturdy, a conscious perversity; as a ‘document’, somehow, it was ugly, though it might have a decorative grace. ‘His finding me here in presence of it might be more flagrantly disagreeable – for all of us – than you intend or than