To the picture in question she had been always, in fact, able contemplatively to return.  “The difficulty of my enjoyment of that is, don’t you see? that I’m making, in my loyalty to Maggie, a sad hash of his affection for me.”

“You find means to call it then, this whitewashing of his crime, being ‘loyal’ to Maggie?”

“Oh, about that particular crime there is always much to say.  It is always more interesting to us than any other crime; it has at least that for it.  But of course I call everything I have in mind at all being loyal to Maggie.  Being loyal to her is, more than anything else, helping her with her father—­which is what she most wants and needs.”

The Colonel had had it before, but he could apparently never have too much of it.  “Helping her ‘with’ him—?”

“Helping her against him then.  Against what we’ve already so fully talked of—­its having to be recognised between them that he doubts.  That’s where my part is so plain—­to see her through, to see her through to the end.”  Exaltation, for the moment, always lighted Mrs. Assingham’s reference to this plainness; yet she at the same time seldom failed, the next instant, to qualify her view of it.  “When I talk of my obligation as clear I mean that it’s absolute; for just how, from day to day and through thick and thin, to keep the thing up is, I grant you, another matter.  There’s one way, luckily, nevertheless, in which I’m strong.  I can perfectly count on her.”

The Colonel seldom failed here, as from the insidious growth of an excitement, to wonder, to encourage.  “Not to see you’re lying?”

“To stick to me fast, whatever she sees.  If I stick to her—­that is to my own poor struggling way, under providence, of watching over them all—­she’ll stand by me to the death.  She won’t give me away.  For, you know, she easily can.”

This, regularly, was the most lurid turn of their road; but Bob Assingham, with each journey, met it as for the first time.  “Easily?”

“She can utterly dishonour me with her father.  She can let him know that I was aware, at the time of his marriage—­as I had been aware at the time of her own—­of the relations that had pre-existed between his wife and her husband.”

“And how can she do so if, up to this minute, by your own statement, she is herself in ignorance of your knowledge?”

It was a question that Mrs. Assingham had ever, for dealing with, a manner to which repeated practice had given almost a grand effect; very much as if she was invited by it to say that about this, exactly, she proposed to do her best lying.  But she said, and with full lucidity, something quite other:  it could give itself a little the air, still, of a triumph over his coarseness.  “By acting, immediately with the blind resentment with which, in her place, ninety-nine women out of a hundred would act; and by so making Mr. Verver, in turn, act with the same natural passion, the passion of ninety-nine