of women.  He conveyed to her now, at all events, by refusing her no gentleness, that he had sufficiently got the tip, and that the tip was all he had wanted.  This remained quite clear even when he presently reverted to what she had told him of her recent passage with Maggie.  “I don’t altogether see, you know, what you infer from it, or why you infer anything.”  When he so expressed himself it was quite as if in possession of what they had brought up from the depths.

XXIV

“I can’t say more,” this made his companion reply, “than that something in her face, her voice and her whole manner acted upon me as nothing in her had ever acted before; and just for the reason, above all, that I felt her trying her very best—­and her very best, poor duck, is very good—­to be quiet and natural.  It’s when one sees people who always are natural making little pale, pathetic, blinking efforts for it—­then it is that one knows something’s the matter.  I can’t describe my impression—­you would have had it for yourself.  And the only thing that ever can be the matter with Maggie is that.  By ‘that’ I mean her beginning to doubt.  To doubt, for the first time,” Mrs. Assingham wound up, “of her wonderful little judgment of her wonderful little world.”

It was impressive, Fanny’s vision, and the Colonel, as if himself agitated by it, took another turn of prowling.  “To doubt of fidelity—­to doubt of friendship!  Poor duck indeed!  It will go hard with her.  But she’ll put it all,” he concluded, “on Charlotte.”

Mrs. Assingham, still darkly contemplative, denied this with a headshake.  “She won’t ‘put’ it anywhere.  She won’t do with it anything anyone else would.  She’ll take it all herself.”

“You mean she’ll make it out her own fault?”

“Yes—­she’ll find means, somehow, to arrive at that.”

“Ah then,” the Colonel dutifully declared, “she’s indeed a little brick!”

“Oh,” his wife returned, “you’ll see, in one way or another, to what tune!” And she spoke, of a sudden, with an approach to elation—­so that, as if immediately feeling his surprise, she turned round to him.  “She’ll see me somehow through!”

“See you—?”

“Yes, me.  I’m the worst.  For,” said Fanny Assingham, now with a harder exaltation, “I did it all.  I recognise that—­I accept it.  She won’t cast it up at me—­she won’t cast up anything.  So I throw myself upon her—­she’ll bear me up.”  She spoke almost volubly—­she held him with her sudden sharpness.  “She’ll carry the whole weight of us.”

There was still, nevertheless, wonder in it.  “You mean she won’t mind?  I say, love—!” And he not unkindly stared.  “Then where’s the difficulty?”

“There isn’t any!” Fanny declared with the same rich emphasis.  It kept him indeed, as by the loss of the thread, looking at her longer.  “Ah, you mean there isn’t any for us!”