“An idiot—?”

“Well, the idiot that I’ve been, in all sorts of ways—­so often, of late, have I asked it.  You’re excusable, since you ask it but now.  The answer, I saw to-day, has all the while been staring me in the face.”

“Then what in the world is it?”

“Why, the very intensity of her conscience about him—­the very passion of her brave little piety.  That’s the way it has worked,” Mrs. Assingham explained “and I admit it to have been as ‘rum’ a way as possible.  But it has been working from a rum start.  From the moment the dear man married to ease his daughter off, and it then happened, by an extraordinary perversity, that the very opposite effect was produced—!” With the renewed vision of this fatality, however, she could give but a desperate shrug.

“I see,” the Colonel sympathetically mused.  “That was a rum start.”

But his very response, as she again flung up her arms, seemed to make her sense, for a moment, intolerable.  “Yes—­there I am!  I was really at the bottom of it,” she declared; “I don’t know what possessed me—­but I planned for him, I goaded him on.”  With which, however, the next moment, she took herself up.  “Or, rather, I do know what possessed me—­for wasn’t he beset with ravening women, right and left, and didn’t he, quite pathetically, appeal for protection, didn’t he, quite charmingly, show one how he needed and desired it?  Maggie,” she thus lucidly continued, “couldn’t, with a new life of her own, give herself up to doing for him in the future all she had done in the past—­to fencing him in, to keeping him safe and keeping them off.  One perceived this,” she went on—­“out of the abundance of one’s affection and one’s sympathy.”  It all blessedly came back to her—­when it wasn’t all, for the fiftieth time, obscured, in face of the present facts, by anxiety and compunction.  “One was no doubt a meddlesome fool; one always is, to think one sees people’s lives for them better than they see them for themselves.  But one’s excuse here,” she insisted, “was that these people clearly didn’t see them for themselves—­didn’t see them at all.  It struck one for very pity—­that they were making a mess of such charming material; that they were but wasting it and letting it go.  They didn’t know how to live—­and “somehow one couldn’t, if one took an interest in them at all, simply stand and see it.  That’s what I pay for”—­and the poor woman, in straighter communion with her companion’s intelligence at this moment, she appeared to feel, than she had ever been before, let him have the whole of the burden of her consciousness.  “I always pay for it, sooner or later, my sociable, my damnable, my unnecessary interest.  Nothing of course would suit me but that it should fix itself also on Charlotte—­Charlotte who was hovering there on the edge of our lives, when not beautifully, and a trifle mysteriously, flitting across them, and who was a piece of waste and a piece