“No—­we mustn’t touch her.  We mayn’t touch any of them.  We must keep our hands off; we must go on tiptoe.  We must simply watch and wait.  And meanwhile,” said Mrs. Assingham, “we must bear it as we can.  That’s where we are—­and serves us right.  We’re in presence.”

And so, moving about the room as in communion with shadowy portents, she left it till he questioned again.  “In presence of what?”

“Well, of something possibly beautiful.  Beautiful as it may come off.”

She had paused there before him while he wondered.  “You mean she’ll get the Prince back?”

She raised her hand in quick impatience:  the suggestion might have been almost abject.  “It isn’t a question of recovery.  It won’t be a question of any vulgar struggle.  To ‘get him back’ she must have lost him, and to have lost him she must have had him.  “With which Fanny shook her head.  “What I take her to be waking up to is the truth that, all the while, she really hasn’t had him.  Never.”

“Ah, my dear—!” the poor Colonel panted.

“Never!” his wife repeated.  And she went on without pity.  “Do you remember what I said to you long ago—­that evening, just before their marriage, when Charlotte had so suddenly turned up?”

The smile with which he met this appeal was not, it was to be feared, robust.  “What haven’t you, love, said in your time?”

“So many things, no doubt, that they make a chance for my having once or twice spoken the truth.  I never spoke it more, at all events, than when I put it to you, that evening, that Maggie was the person in the world to whom a wrong thing could least be communicated.  It was as if her imagination had been closed to it, her sense altogether sealed, That therefore,” Fanny continued, “is what will now have to happen.  Her sense will have to open.”

“I see.”  He nodded.  “To the wrong.”  He nodded again, almost cheerfully—­as if he had been keeping the peace with a baby or a lunatic.  “To the very, very wrong.”

But his wife’s spirit, after its effort of wing, was able to remain higher.  “To what’s called Evil—­with a very big E:  for the first time in her life.  To the discovery of it, to the knowledge of it, to the crude experience of it.”  And she gave, for the possibility, the largest measure.  “To the harsh, bewildering brush, the daily chilling breath of it.  Unless indeed”—­and here Mrs. Assingham noted a limit “unless indeed, as yet (so far as she has come, and if she comes no further), simply to the suspicion and the dread.  What we shall see is whether that mere dose of alarm will prove enough.”

He considered.  “But enough for what then, dear—­if not enough to break her heart?”

“Enough to give her a shaking!” Mrs. Assingham rather oddly replied.  “To give her, I mean, the right one.  The right one won’t break her heart.  It will make her,” she explained—­“well, it will make her, by way of a change, understand one or two things in the world.”