as to the time of their visit, he could place it, positively, to a day—­by reason of a transaction of importance, recorded in his books, that had occurred but a few hours later.  He had left her, in short, definitely rejoicing that he had been able to make up to her for not having been quite “square” over their little business by rendering her, so unexpectedly, the service of this information.  His joy, moreover, was—­as much as Amerigo would!—­a matter of the personal interest with which her kindness, gentleness, grace, her charming presence and easy humanity and familiarity, had inspired him.  All of which, while, in thought, Maggie went over it again and again —­oh, over any imputable rashness of her own immediate passion and pain, as well as over the rest of the straight little story she had, after all, to tell—­might very conceivably make a long sum for the Prince to puzzle out.

There were meanwhile, after the Castledeans and those invited to meet them had gone, and before Mrs. Rance and the Lutches had come, three or four days during which she was to learn the full extent of her need not to be penetrable; and then it was indeed that she felt all the force, and threw herself upon all the help, of the truth she had confided, several nights earlier, to Fanny Assingham.  She had known it in advance, had warned herself of it while the house was full:  Charlotte had designs upon her of a nature best known to herself, and was only waiting for the better opportunity of their finding themselves less companioned.  This consciousness had been exactly at the bottom of Maggie’s wish to multiply their spectators; there were moments for her, positively, moments of planned postponement, of evasion scarcely less disguised than studied, during which she turned over with anxiety the different ways—­there being two or three possible ones—­in which her young stepmother might, at need, seek to work upon her.  Amerigo’s not having “told” her of his passage with his wife gave, for Maggie, altogether a new aspect to Charlotte’s consciousness and condition—­an aspect with which, for apprehension, for wonder, and even, at moments, inconsequently enough, for something like compassion, the Princess had now to reckon.  She asked herself—­for she was capable of that—­what he had meant by keeping the sharer of his guilt in the dark about a matter touching her otherwise so nearly; what he had meant, that is, for this unmistakably mystified personage herself.  Maggie could imagine what he had meant for her—­all sorts of thinkable things, whether things of mere “form” or things of sincerity, things of pity or things of prudence:  he had meant, for instance, in all probability, primarily, to conjure away any such appearance of a changed relation between the two women as his father-in-law might notice and follow up.  It would have been open to him however, given the pitch of their intimacy, to avert this danger by some more conceivable course with Charlotte;