“Precisely—­there you are.”

“Yet on the other hand,” she always went on, “he may be sublime:  sublimer even than Maggie herself.  He may in fact have already been.  But we shall never know.”  With which her tone betrayed perhaps a shade of soreness for the single exemption she didn’t yearningly welcome.  “That I can see.”

“Oh, I say—!” It came to affect the Colonel himself with a sense of privation.

“I’m not sure, even, that Charlotte will.”

“Oh, my dear, what Charlotte doesn’t know—!”

But she brooded and brooded.  “I’m not sure even that the Prince will.”  It seemed privation, in short, for them all.  “They’ll be mystified, confounded, tormented.  But they won’t know—­and all their possible putting their heads together won’t make them.  That,” said Fanny Assingham, “will be their punishment.”  And she ended, ever, when she had come so far, at the same pitch.  “It will probably also—­if I get off with so little—­be mine.”

“And what,” her husband liked to ask, “will be mine?”

“Nothing—­you’re not worthy of any.  One’s punishment is in what one feels, and what will make ours effective is that we shall feel.”  She was splendid with her “ours”; she flared up with this prophecy.  “It will be Maggie herself who will mete it out.”

“Maggie—?”

“She’ll know—­about her father; everything.  Everything,” she repeated.  On the vision of which, each time, Mrs. Assingham, as with the presentiment of an odd despair, turned away from it.  “But she’ll never tell us.”

XXXII

If Maggie had not so firmly made up her mind never to say, either to her good friend or to any one else, more than she meant about her father, she might have found herself betrayed into some such overflow during the week spent in London with her husband after the others had adjourned to Fawns for the summer.  This was because of the odd element of the unnatural imparted to the so simple fact of their brief separation by the assumptions resident in their course of life hitherto.  She was used, herself, certainly, by this time, to dealing with odd elements; but she dropped, instantly, even from such peace as she had patched up, when it was a question of feeling that her unpenetrated parent might be alone with them.  She thought of him as alone with them when she thought of him as alone with Charlotte—­and this, strangely enough, even while fixing her sense to the full on his wife’s power of preserving, quite of enhancing, every felicitous appearance.  Charlotte had done that—­under immeasurably fewer difficulties indeed—­during the numerous months of their hymeneal absence from England, the period prior to that wonderful reunion of the couples, in the interest of the larger play of all the virtues of each, which was now bearing, for Mrs. Verver’s stepdaughter at least, such remarkable fruit.  It was the present so much briefer interval, in a situation, possibly