Mrs. Assingham wondered, during these instants, how much she even now knew; it had taken a minute to perceive how gently she was speaking.  With that perception of its being no challenge of wrath, no heat of the deceived soul, but only a free exposure of the completeness of past ignorance, inviting derision even if it must, the elder woman felt, first, a strange, barely credible relief:  she drew in, as if it had been the warm summer scent of a flower, the sweet certainty of not meeting, any way she should turn, any consequence of judgment.  She shouldn’t be judged—­save by herself; which was her own wretched business.  The next moment, however, at all events, she blushed, within, for her immediate cowardice:  she had thought of herself, thought of “getting off,” before so much as thinking—­that is of pitifully seeing—­that she was in presence of an appeal that was all an appeal, that utterly accepted its necessity.  “In a general way, dear child, yes.  But not—­a—­in connexion with what you’ve been telling me.”

“They were intimate, you see.  Intimate,” said the Princess.

Fanny continued to face her, taking from her excited eyes this history, so dim and faint for all her anxious emphasis, of the far-away other time.  “There’s always the question of what one considers—!”

“What one considers intimate?  Well, I know what I consider intimate now.  Too intimate,” said Maggie, “to let me know anything about it.”

It was quiet—­yes; but not too quiet for Fanny Assingham’s capacity to wince.  “Only compatible with letting me, you mean?” She had asked it after a pause, but turning again to the new ornament of the chimney and wondering, even while she took relief from it, at this gap in her experience.  “But here are things, my dear, of which my ignorance is perfect.”

“They went about together—­they’re known to have done it.  And I don’t mean only before—­I mean after.”

“After?” said Fanny Assingham.

“Before we were married—­yes; but after we were engaged.”

“Ah, I’ve known nothing about that!” And she said it with a braver assurance—­clutching, with comfort, at something that was apparently new to her.

“That bowl,” Maggie went on, “is, so strangely—­too strangely, almost, to believe at this time of day—­the proof.  They were together all the while—­up to the very eve of our marriage.  Don’t you remember how just before that she came back, so unexpectedly, from America?”

The question had for Mrs. Assingham—­and whether all consciously or not—­the oddest pathos of simplicity.  “Oh yes, dear, of course I remember how she came back from America—­and how she stayed with us, and what view one had of it.”