“What makes them?”—­he pressed her as she fitfully dropped.

“Well, makes the Prince and Charlotte take it all as they do.  It might well have been difficult to know how to take it; and they may even say for themselves that they were a long time trying to see.  As I say, to-day,” she went on, “it was as if I were suddenly, with a kind of horrible push, seeing through their eyes.”  On which, as to shake off her perversity, Fanny Assingham sprang up.  But she remained there, under the dim illumination, and while the Colonel, with his high, dry, spare look of “type,” to which a certain conformity to the whiteness of inaccessible snows in his necktie, shirt-front and waistcoat gave a rigour of accent, waited, watching her, they might, at the late hour and in the still house, have been a pair of specious worldly adventurers, driven for relief, under sudden stress, to some grim midnight reckoning in an odd corner.  Her attention moved mechanically over the objects of ornament disposed too freely on the walls of staircase and landing, as to which recognition, for the time, had lost both fondness and compunction.  “I can imagine the way it works,” she said; “it’s so easy to understand.  Yet I don’t want to be wrong,” she the next moment broke out “I don’t, I don’t want to be wrong!”

“To make a mistake, you mean?”

Oh no, she meant nothing of the sort; she knew but too well what she meant.  “I don’t make mistakes.  But I perpetrate—­in thought—­ crimes.”  And she spoke with all intensity.  “I’m a most dreadful person.  There are times when I seem not to mind a bit what I’ve done, or what I think or imagine or fear or accept; when I feel that I’d do it again—­feel that I’d do things myself.”

“Ah, my dear!” the Colonel remarked in the coolness of debate.

“Yes, if you had driven me back on my ‘nature.’  Luckily for you you never have.  You’ve done every thing else, but you’ve never done that.  But what I really don’t a bit want,” she declared, “is to abet them or to protect them.”

Her companion turned this over.  “What is there to protect them from?—­if, by your now so settled faith, they’ve done nothing that justly exposes them.”

And it in fact half pulled her up.  “Well, from a sudden scare.  From the alarm, I mean, of what Maggie may think.”

“Yet if your whole idea is that Maggie thinks nothing—?”

She waited again.  “It isn’t my ‘whole’ idea.  Nothing is my ‘whole’ idea—­for I felt to-day, as I tell you, that there’s so much in the air.”

“Oh, in the air—!” the Colonel dryly breathed.

“Well, what’s in the air always has—­hasn’t it?—­to come down to the earth.  And Maggie,” Mrs. Assingham continued, “is a very curious little person.  Since I was ‘in,’ this afternoon, for seeing more than I had ever done—­well, I felt that too, for some reason, as I hadn’t yet felt it.”

“For ‘some’ reason?  For what reason?” And then, as his wife at first said nothing:  “Did she give any sign?  Was she in any way different?”