Meanwhile, however such things might be, she was to have occasion to say to herself that there might be but a deeper treachery in recoveries and reassurances.  She was to feel alone again, as she had felt at the issue of her high tension with her husband during their return from meeting the Castledeans in Eaton Square.  The evening in question had left her with a larger alarm, but then a lull had come—­the alarm, after all, was yet to be confirmed.  There came an hour, inevitably, when she knew, with a chill, what she had feared and why; it had taken, this hour, a month to arrive, but to find it before her was thoroughly to recognise it, for it showed her sharply what Amerigo had meant in alluding to a particular use that they might make, for their reaffirmed harmony and prosperity, of Charlotte.  The more she thought, at present, of the tone he had employed to express their enjoyment of this resource, the more it came back to her as the product of a conscious art of dealing with her.  He had been conscious, at the moment, of many things—­conscious even, not a little, of desiring; and thereby of needing, to see what she would do in a given case.  The given case would be that of her being to a certain extent, as she might fairly make it out, menaced—­ horrible as it was to impute to him any intention represented by such a word.  Why it was that to speak of making her stepmother intervene, as they might call it, in a question that seemed, just then and there, quite peculiarly their own business—­why it was that a turn so familiar and so easy should, at the worst, strike her as charged with the spirit of a threat, was an oddity disconnected, for her, temporarily, from its grounds, the adventure of an imagination within her that possibly had lost its way.  That, precisely, was doubtless why she had learned to wait, as the weeks passed by, with a fair, or rather indeed with an excessive, imitation of resumed serenity.  There had been no prompt sequel to the Prince’s equivocal light, and that made for patience; yet she was none the less to have to admit, after delay, that the bread he had cast on the waters had come home, and that she should thus be justified of her old apprehension.  The consequence of this, in turn, was a renewed pang in presence of his remembered ingenuity.  To be ingenious with her—­what didn’t, what mightn’t that mean, when she had so absolutely never, at any point of contact with him, put him, by as much as the value of a penny, to the expense of sparing, doubting, fearing her, of having in any way whatever to reckon with her?  The ingenuity had been in his simply speaking of their use of Charlotte as if it were common to them in an equal degree, and his triumph, on the occasion, had been just in the simplicity.  She couldn’t—­and he knew it—­say what was true:  “Oh, you ‘use’ her, and I use her, if you will, yes; but we use her ever so differently and separately—­not at all in the same way or degree.  There’s nobody we really use together but ourselves, don’t you see?—­by which I mean that where our interests are the same I can so beautifully, so exquisitely serve you for everything, and you can so beautifully, so exquisitely serve me.  The only person either of us needs is the other of us; so why, as a matter of course, in such a case as this, drag in Charlotte?”