“So that you think,” her father presently said, “that I had better get married just in order to be as I was before?”

The detached tone of it—­detached as if innocently to amuse her by showing his desire to accommodate—­was so far successful as to draw from her gravity a short, light laugh.  “Well, what I don’t want you to feel is that if you were to I shouldn’t understand.  I should understand.  That’s all,” said the Princess gently.

Her companion turned it pleasantly over.  “You don’t go so far as to wish me to take somebody I don’t like?”

“Ah, father,” she sighed, “you know how far I go—­how far I could go.  But I only wish that if you ever should like anybody, you may never doubt of my feeling how I’ve brought you to it.  You’ll always know that I know that it’s my fault.”

“You mean,” he went on in his contemplative way, “that it will be you who’ll take the consequences?”

Maggie just considered.  “I’ll leave you all the good ones, but I’ll take the bad.”

“Well, that’s handsome.”  He emphasised his sense of it by drawing her closer and holding her more tenderly.  “It’s about all I could expect of you.  So far as you’ve wronged me, therefore, we’ll call it square.  I’ll let you know in time if I see a prospect of your having to take it up.  But am I to understand meanwhile,” he soon went on, “that, ready as you are to see me through my collapse, you’re not ready, or not as ready, to see me through my resistance?  I’ve got to be a regular martyr before you’ll be inspired?”

She demurred at his way of putting it.  “Why, if you like it, you know, it won’t be a collapse.”

“Then why talk about seeing me through at all?  I shall only collapse if I do like it.  But what I seem to feel is that I don’t want to like it.  That is,” he amended, “unless I feel surer I do than appears very probable.  I don’t want to have to think I like it in a case when I really shan’t.  I’ve had to do that in some cases,” he confessed—­“when it has been a question of other things.  I don’t want,” he wound up, “to be made to make a mistake.”

“Ah, but it’s too dreadful,” she returned, “that you should even have to fear—­or just nervously to dream—­that you may be.  What does that show, after all,” she asked, “but that you do really, well within, feel a want?  What does it show but that you’re truly susceptible?”

“Well, it may show that”—­he defended himself against nothing.  “But it shows also, I think, that charming women are, in the kind of life we’re leading now, numerous and formidable.”

Maggie entertained for a moment the proposition; under cover of which, however, she passed quickly from the general to the particular.  “Do you feel Mrs. Rance to be charming?”

“Well, I feel her to be formidable.  When they cast a spell it comes to the same thing.  I think she’d do anything.”