her all blurred and dim.  The high voice went on; its quaver was doubtless for conscious ears only, but there were verily thirty seconds during which it sounded, for our young woman, like the shriek of a soul in pain.  Kept up a minute longer it would break and collapse—­so that Maggie felt herself, the next thing, turn with a start to her father.  “Can’t she be stopped?  Hasn’t she done it enough?”—­ some such question as that she let herself ask him to suppose in her.  Then it was that, across half the gallery—­for he had not moved from where she had first seen him—­he struck her as confessing, with strange tears in his own eyes, to sharp identity of emotion.  “Poor thing, poor thing”—­it reached straight—­ “Isn’t she, for one’s credit, on the swagger?” After which, as, held thus together they had still another strained minute, the shame, the pity, the better knowledge, the smothered protest, the divined anguish even, so overcame him that, blushing to his eyes, he turned short away.  The affair but of a few muffled moments, this snatched communion yet lifted Maggie as on air—­so much, for deep guesses on her own side too, it gave her to think of.  There was, honestly, an awful mixture in things, and it was not closed to her aftersense of such passages—­we have already indeed, in other cases, seen it open—­that the deepest depth of all, in a perceived penalty, was that you couldn’t be sure some of your compunctions and contortions wouldn’t show for ridiculous.  Amerigo, that morning, for instance, had been as absent as he at this juncture appeared to desire he should mainly be noted as being; he had gone to London for the day and the night—­a necessity that now frequently rose for him and that he had more than once suffered to operate during the presence of guests, successions of pretty women, the theory of his fond interest in whom had been publicly cultivated.  It had never occurred to his wife to pronounce him ingenuous, but there came at last a high dim August dawn when she couldn’t sleep and when, creeping restlessly about and breathing at her window the coolness of wooded acres, she found the faint flush of the east march with the perception of that other almost equal prodigy.  It rosily coloured her vision that—­even such as he was, yes—­her husband could on occasion sin by excess of candour.  He wouldn’t otherwise have given as his reason for going up to Portland Place in the August days that he was arranging books there.  He had bought a great many of late, and he had had others, a large number, sent from Rome—­wonders of old print in which her father had been interested.  But when her imagination tracked him to the dusty town, to the house where drawn blinds and pale shrouds, where a caretaker and a kitchenmaid were alone in possession, it wasn’t to see him, in his shirtsleeves, unpacking battered boxes.