away from—­just as he was consciously drawing the child, and as high Miss Bogle on her left, representing the duties of home, was complacently drawing her.  The duties of home, when the house in Portland Place reappeared, showed, even from a distance, as vividly there before them.  Amerigo and Charlotte had come in—­ that is Amerigo had, Charlotte, rather, having come out—­and the pair were perched together in the balcony, he bare-headed, she divested of her jacket, her mantle, or whatever, but crowned with a brilliant brave hat, responsive to the balmy day, which Maggie immediately “spotted” as new, as insuperably original, as worn, in characteristic generous harmony, for the first time; all, evidently, to watch for the return of the absent, to be there to take them over again as punctually as possible.  They were gay, they were amused, in the pleasant morning; they leaned across the rail and called down their greeting, lighting up the front of the great black house with an expression that quite broke the monotony, that might almost have shocked the decency, of Portland Place.  The group on the pavement stared up as at the peopled battlements of a castle; even Miss Bogle, who carried her head most aloft, gaped a little, through the interval of space, as toward truly superior beings.  There could scarce have been so much of the open mouth since the dingy waits, on Christmas Eve, had so lamentably chanted for pennies—­the time when Amerigo, insatiable for English customs, had come out, with a gasped “Santissima Vergine!” to marvel at the depositaries of this tradition and purchase a reprieve.  Maggie’s individual gape was inevitably again for the thought of how the pair would be at work.

XXX

She had not again, for weeks, had Mrs. Assingham so effectually in presence as on the afternoon of that lady’s return from the Easter party at Matcham; but the intermission was made up as soon as the date of the migration to Fawns—­that of the more or less simultaneous adjournment of the two houses—­began to be discussed.  It had struck her, promptly, that this renewal, with an old friend, of the old terms she had talked of with her father, was the one opening, for her spirit, that wouldn’t too much advertise or betray her.  Even her father, who had always, as he would have said, “believed in” their ancient ally, wouldn’t necessarily suspect her of invoking Fanny’s aid toward any special inquiry—­and least of all if Fanny would only act as Fanny so easily might.  Maggie’s measure of Fanny’s ease would have been agitating to Mrs. Assingham had it been all at once revealed to her—­as, for that matter, it was soon destined to become even on a comparatively graduated showing.  Our young woman’s idea, in particular, was that her safety, her escape from being herself suspected of suspicion, would proceed from this friend’s power to cover, to protect and, as might be, even showily to represent her—­represent, that is, her relation to the form of the life they were