had never made his daughter, and Charlotte must at least have had for her that, thanks to her admirable instinct, her range of perception marching with his own and never falling behind, she had probably not so much as once treated him to a rasping mistake or a revealing stupidity.  Maggie, wonderfully, in the summer days, felt it forced upon her that that was one way, after all, of being a genial wife; and it was never so much forced upon her as at these odd moments of her encountering the sposi, as Amerigo called them, under the coved ceilings of Fawns while, so together, yet at the same time so separate, they were making their daily round.  Charlotte hung behind, with emphasised attention; she stopped when her husband stopped, but at the distance of a case or two, or of whatever other succession of objects; and the likeness of their connection would not have been wrongly figured if he had been thought of as holding in one of his pocketed hands the end of a long silken halter looped round her beautiful neck.  He didn’t twitch it, yet it was there; he didn’t drag her, but she came; and those indications that I have described the Princess as finding extraordinary in him were two or three mute facial intimations which his wife’s presence didn’t prevent his addressing his daughter—­nor prevent his daughter, as she passed, it was doubtless to be added, from flushing a little at the receipt of.  They amounted perhaps only to a wordless, wordless smile, but the smile was the soft shake of the twisted silken rope, and Maggie’s translation of it, held in her breast till she got well away, came out only, as if it might have been overheard, when some door was closed behind her.  “Yes, you see—­I lead her now by the neck, I lead her to her doom, and she doesn’t so much as know what it is, though she has a fear in her heart which, if you had the chances to apply your ear there that I, as a husband, have, you would hear thump and thump and thump.  She thinks it may be, her doom, the awful place over there—­awful for her; but she’s afraid to ask, don’t you see? just as she’s afraid of not asking; just as she’s afraid of so many other things that she sees multiplied round her now as portents and betrayals.  She’ll know, however—­when she does know.”

Charlotte’s one opportunity, meanwhile, for the air of confidence she had formerly worn so well and that agreed so with her firm and charming type, was the presence of visitors, never, as the season advanced, wholly intermitted—­rather, in fact, so constant, with all the people who turned up for luncheon and for tea and to see the house, now replete, now famous, that Maggie grew to think again of this large element of “company” as of a kind of renewed water-supply for the tank in which, like a party of panting gold-fish, they kept afloat.  It helped them, unmistakably, with each other, weakening the emphasis of so many of the silences of which their intimate intercourse would otherwise have consisted.  Beautiful and wonderful