These shadows rose and fell for her while Father Mitchell prattled; with other shadows as well, those that hung over Charlotte herself, those that marked her as a prey to equal suspicions—­to the idea, in particular, of a change, such a change as she didn’t dare to face, in the relations of the two men.  Or there were yet other possibilities, as it seemed to Maggie; there were always too many, and all of them things of evil when one’s nerves had at last done for one all that nerves could do; had left one in a darkness of prowling dangers that was like the predicament of the night-watcher in a beast-haunted land who has no more means for a fire.  She might, with such nerves, have supposed almost anything of any one; anything, almost, of poor Bob Assingham, condemned to eternal observances and solemnly appreciating her father’s wine; anything, verily, yes, of the good priest, as he finally sat back with fat folded hands and twiddled his thumbs on his stomach.  The good priest looked hard at the decanters, at the different dishes of dessert—­he eyed them, half-obliquely, as if they might have met him to-day, for conversation, better than any one present.  But the Princess had her fancy at last about that too; she was in the midst of a passage, before she knew it, between Father Mitchell and Charlotte—­some approach he would have attempted with her, that very morning perhaps, to the circumstance of an apparent detachment, recently noted in her, from any practice of devotion.  He would have drawn from this, say, his artless inference—­taken it for a sign of some smothered inward trouble and pointed, naturally, the moral that the way out of such straits was not through neglect of the grand remedy.  He had possibly prescribed contrition—­he had at any rate quickened in her the beat of that false repose to which our young woman’s own act had devoted her at her all so deluded instance.  The falsity of it had laid traps compared to which the imputation of treachery even accepted might have seemed a path of roses.  The acceptance, strangely, would have left her nothing to do—­she could have remained, had she liked, all insolently passive; whereas the failure to proceed against her, as it might have been called, left her everything, and all the more that it was wrapped so in confidence.  She had to confirm, day after day, the rightness of her cause and the justice and felicity of her exemption—­so that wouldn’t there have been, fairly, in any explicit concern of Father Mitchell’s, depths of practical derision of her success?

The question was provisionally answered, at all events, by the time the party at luncheon had begun to disperse—­with Maggie’s version of Mrs. Verver sharp to the point of representing her pretext for absence as a positive flight from derision.  She met the good priest’s eyes before they separated, and priests were really, at the worst, so to speak, such wonderful people that she believed him for an instant on the verge of saying to her, in abysmal softness: