“May have stayed over at Matcham itself till tomorrow.  May have wired home, each of them, since Maggie left me.  May have done,” Fanny Assingham continued, “God knows what!” She went on, suddenly, with more emotion—­which, at the pressure of some spring of her inner vision, broke out in a wail of distress, imperfectly smothered.  “Whatever they’ve done I shall never know.  Never, never—­because I don’t want to, and because nothing will induce me.  So they may do as they like.  But I’ve worked for them all” She uttered this last with another irrepressible quaver, and the next moment her tears had come, though she had, with the explosion, quitted her husband as if to hide it from him.  She passed into the dusky drawing-room, where, during his own prowl, shortly previous, he had drawn up a blind, so that the light of the street-lamps came in a little at the window.  She made for this window, against which she leaned her head, while the Colonel, with his lengthened face, looked after her for a minute and hesitated.  He might have been wondering what she had really done, to what extent, beyond his knowledge or his conception, in the affairs of these people, she could have committed herself.  But to hear her cry, and yet try not to, was, quickly enough, too much for him; he had known her at other times quite not try not to, and that had not been so bad.  He went to her and put his arm round her; he drew her head to his breast, where, while she gasped, she let it stay a little—­all with a patience that presently stilled her.  Yet the effect of this small crisis, oddly enough, was not to close their colloquy, with the natural result of sending them to bed:  what was between them had opened out further, had somehow, through the sharp show of her feeling, taken a positive stride, had entered, as it were, without more words, the region of the understood, shutting the door after it and bringing them so still more nearly face to face.  They remained for some minutes looking at it through the dim window which opened upon the world of human trouble in general and which let the vague light play here and there upon gilt and crystal and colour, the florid features, looming dimly, of Fanny’s drawing-room.  And the beauty of what thus passed between them, passed with her cry of pain, with her burst of tears, with his wonderment and his kindness and his comfort, with the moments of their silence, above all, which might have represented their sinking together, hand in hand, for a time, into the mystic lake where he had begun, as we have hinted, by seeing her paddle alone—­the beauty of it was that they now could really talk better than before, because the basis had at last, once for all, defined itself.  What was the basis, which Fanny absolutely exacted, but that Charlotte and the Prince must be saved—­so far as consistently speaking of them as still safe might save them?  It did save them, somehow, for Fanny’s troubled mind—­for that was the nature of the mind