When the blocks tumbled down they but acted after the nature of blocks; yet the hour would come for their rising so high that the structure would have to be noticed and admired.  Mrs. Assingham’s appearance of unreservedly giving herself involved meanwhile, on her own side, no separate recognitions:  her face of almost anxious attention was directed altogether to her young friend’s so vivid felicity; it suggested that she took for granted, at the most, certain vague recent enhancements of that state.  If the Princess now, more than before, was going and going, she was prompt to publish that she beheld her go, that she had always known she would, sooner or later, and that any appeal for participation must more or less contain and invite the note of triumph.  There was a blankness in her blandness, assuredly, and very nearly an extravagance in her generalising gaiety; a precipitation of cheer particularly marked whenever they met again after short separations:  meetings during the first flush of which Maggie sometimes felt reminded of other looks in other faces; of two strangely unobliterated impressions above all, the physiognomic light that had played out in her husband at the shock—­she had come at last to talk to herself of the “shock”—­of his first vision of her on his return from Matcham and Gloucester, and the wonder of Charlotte’s beautiful bold wavering gaze when, the next morning in Eaton Square, this old friend had turned from the window to begin to deal with her.

If she had dared to think of it so crudely she would have said that Fanny was afraid of her, afraid of something she might say or do, even as, for their few brief seconds, Amerigo and Charlotte had been—­which made, exactly, an expressive element common to the three.  The difference however was that this look had in the dear woman its oddity of a constant renewal, whereas it had never for the least little instant again peeped out of the others.  Other looks, other lights, radiant and steady, with the others, had taken its place, reaching a climax so short a time ago, that morning of the appearance of the pair on the balcony of her house to overlook what she had been doing with her father; when their general interested brightness and beauty, attuned to the outbreak of summer, had seemed to shed down warmth and welcome and the promise of protection.  They were conjoined not to do anything to startle her—­and now at last so completely that, with experience and practice, they had almost ceased to fear their liability.  Mrs. Assingham, on the other hand, deprecating such an accident not less, had yet less assurance, as having less control.  The high pitch of her cheer, accordingly, the tentative, adventurous expressions, of the would-be smiling order, that preceded her approach even like a squad of skirmishers, or whatever they were called, moving ahead of the baggage train—­ these things had at the end of a fortnight brought a dozen times to our young woman’s lips a challenge