Fanny’s look had taken a peculiar gravity—­a fulness with which it seemed to shine.  “Is what it comes to that you’re jealous of Charlotte?”

“Do you mean whether I hate her?”—­and Maggie thought.  “No; not on account of father.”

“Ah,” Mrs. Assingham returned, “that isn’t what one would suppose.  What I ask is if you’re jealous on account of your husband.”

“Well,” said Maggie presently, “perhaps that may be all.  If I’m unhappy I’m jealous; it must come to the same thing; and with you, at least, I’m not afraid of the word.  If I’m jealous, don’t you see?  I’m tormented,” she went on—­“and all the more if I’m helpless.  And if I’m both helpless and tormented I stuff my pocket-handkerchief into my mouth, I keep it there, for the most part, night and day, so as not to be heard too indecently moaning.  Only now, with you, at last, I can’t keep it longer; I’ve pulled it out, and here I am fairly screaming at you.  They’re away,” she wound up, “so they can’t hear; and I’m, by a miracle of arrangement, not at luncheon with father at home.  I live in the midst of miracles of arrangement, half of which I admit, are my own; I go about on tiptoe, I watch for every sound, I feel every breath, and yet I try all the while to seem as smooth as old satin dyed rose-colour.  Have you ever thought of me,” she asked, “as really feeling as I do?”

Her companion, conspicuously, required to be clear.  “Jealous, unhappy, tormented—?  No,” said Mrs. Assingham; “but at the same time—­and though you may laugh at me for it!—­I’m bound to confess that I’ve never been so awfully sure of what I may call knowing you.  Here you are indeed, as you say—­such a deep little person!  I’ve never imagined your existence poisoned, and, since you wish to know if I consider that it need be, I’ve not the least difficulty in speaking on the spot.  Nothing, decidedly, strikes me as more unnecessary.”

For a minute after this they remained face to face; Maggie had sprung up while her friend sat enthroned, and, after moving to and fro in her intensity, now paused to receive the light she had invoked.  It had accumulated, considerably, by this time, round Mrs. Assingham’s ample presence, and it made, even to our young woman’s own sense, a medium in which she could at last take a deeper breath.  “I’ve affected you, these months—­and these last weeks in especial—­as quiet and natural and easy?”

But it was a question that took, not imperceptibly, some answering.  “You’ve never affected me, from the first hour I beheld you, as anything but—­in a way all your own—­absolutely good and sweet and beautiful.  In a way, as I say,” Mrs. Assingham almost caressingly repeated, “just all your very own—­nobody else’s at all.  I’ve never thought of you but as outside of ugly things, so ignorant of any falsity or cruelty or vulgarity as never to have to be touched by them or to touch them.  I’ve never mixed you up with them; there would have been time enough for that if they had seemed to be near you.  But they haven’t—­if that’s what you want to know.”