“Well, that he must feel how much less than she he pays—­and how that ought to keep her present to him.”

This, in its turn, after an instant, Mrs. Assingham could meet with a smile.  “Trust him, my dear, to keep her present!  But trust him also to keep himself absent.  Leave him his own way.”

“I’ll leave him everything,” said Maggie.  “Only—­you know it’s my nature—­I think.”

“It’s your nature to think too much,” Fanny Assingham a trifle coarsely risked.

This but quickened, however, in the Princess the act she reprobated.  “That may be.  But if I hadn’t thought—!”

“You wouldn’t, you mean, have been where you are?”

“Yes, because they, on their side, thought of everything but that.  They thought of everything but that I might think.”

“Or even,” her friend too superficially concurred, “that your father might!”

As to this, at all events, Maggie discriminated.  “No, that wouldn’t have prevented them; for they knew that his first care would be not to make me do so.  As it is,” Maggie added, “that has had to become his last.”

Fanny Assingham took it in deeper—­for what it immediately made her give out louder.  “He’s splendid then.”  She sounded it almost aggressively; it was what she was reduced to—­she had positively to place it.

“Ah, that as much as you please!”

Maggie said this and left it, but the tone of it had the next moment determined in her friend a fresh reaction.  “You think, both of you, so abysmally and yet so quietly.  But it’s what will have saved you.”

“Oh,” Maggie returned, “it’s what—­from the moment they discovered we could think at all—­will have saved them.  For they’re the ones who are saved,” she went on.  “We’re the ones who are lost.”

“Lost—?”

“Lost to each other—­father and I” And then as her friend appeared to demur, “Oh yes,” Maggie quite lucidly declared, “lost to each other much more, really, than Amerigo and Charlotte are; since for them it’s just, it’s right, it’s deserved, while for us it’s only sad and strange and not caused by our fault.  But I don’t know,” she went on, “why I talk about myself, for it’s on father it really comes.  I let him go,” said Maggie.

“You let him, but you don’t make him.”

“I take it from him,” she answered.

“But what else can you do?”

“I take it from him,” the Princess repeated.  “I do what I knew from the first I should do.  I get off by giving him up.”

“But if he gives you?” Mrs. Assingham presumed to object.  “Doesn’t it moreover then,” she asked, “complete the very purpose with which he married—­that of making you and leaving you more free?”

Maggie looked at her long.  “Yes—­I help him to do that.”

Mrs. Assingham hesitated, but at last her bravery flared.  “Why not call it then frankly his complete success?”