She met his look for a minute as if it perhaps a little too much imputed a selfishness, a concern, at any cost, for their own surface.  Then she might have been deciding that their own surface was, after all, what they had most to consider.  “Not,” she said with dignity, “if we properly keep our heads.”  She appeared even to signify that they would begin by keeping them now.  This was what it was to have at last a constituted basis.  “Do you remember what you said to me that night of my first real anxiety—­after the Foreign Office party?”

“In the carriage—­as we came home?” Yes—­he could recall it.  “Leave them to pull through?”

“Precisely.  ‘Trust their own wit,’ you practically said, ’to save all appearances.’  Well, I’ve trusted it.  I have left them to pull through.”

He hesitated.  “And your point is that they’re not doing so?”

“I’ve left them,” she went on, “but now I see how and where.  I’ve been leaving them all the while, without knowing it, to her.”

“To the Princess?”

“And that’s what I mean,” Mrs. Assingham pensively pursued.  “That’s what happened to me with her to-day,” she continued to explain.  “It came home to me that that’s what I’ve really been doing.”

“Oh, I see.”

“I needn’t torment myself.  She has taken them over.”

The Colonel declared that he “saw”; yet it was as if, at this, he a little sightlessly stared.  “But what then has happened, from one day to the other, to her?  What has opened her eyes?”

“They were never really shut.  She misses him.”

“Then why hasn’t she missed him before?”

Well, facing him there, among their domestic glooms and glints, Fanny worked it out.  “She did—­but she wouldn’t let herself know it.  She had her reason—­she wore her blind.  Now, at last, her situation has come to a head.  To-day she does know it.  And that’s illuminating.  It has been,” Mrs. Assingham wound up, “illuminating to me.”

Her husband attended, but the momentary effect of his attention was vagueness again, and the refuge of his vagueness was a gasp.  “Poor dear little girl!”

“Ah no—­don’t pity her!”

This did, however, pull him up.  “We mayn’t even be sorry for her?”

“Not now—­or at least not yet.  It’s too soon—­that is if it isn’t very much too late.  This will depend,” Mrs. Assingham went on; “at any rate we shall see.  We might have pitied her before—­for all the good it would then have done her; we might have begun some time ago.  Now, however, she has begun to live.  And the way it comes to me, the way it comes to me—­” But again she projected her vision.

“The way it comes to you can scarcely be that she’ll like it!”

“The way it comes to me is that she will live.  The way it comes to me is that she’ll triumph.”

She said this with so sudden a prophetic flare that it fairly cheered her husband.  “Ah then, we must back her!”