if he should come into the room.  I’ve wanted it to meet him,” she went on, “and I’ve wanted him to meet it, and to be myself present at the meeting.  But that hasn’t taken place as yet; often as he has lately been in the way of coming to see me here—­yes, in particular lately—­he hasn’t showed to-day.”  It was with her managed quietness, more and more, that she talked—­an achieved coherence that helped her, evidently, to hear and to watch herself; there was support, and thereby an awful harmony, but which meant a further guidance, in the facts she could add together.  “It’s quite as if he had an instinct—­something that has warned him off or made him uneasy.  He doesn’t quite know, naturally, what has happened, but guesses, with his beautiful cleverness, that something has, and isn’t in a hurry to be confronted with it.  So, in his vague fear, he keeps off.”

“But being meanwhile in the house—?”

“I’ve no idea—­not having seen him to-day, by exception, since before luncheon.  He spoke to me then,” the Princess freely explained, “of a ballot, of great importance, at a club—­for somebody, some personal friend, I think, who’s coming up and is supposed to be in danger.  To make an effort for him he thought he had better lunch there.  You see the efforts he can make”—­for which Maggie found a smile that went to her friend’s heart.  “He’s in so many ways the kindest of men.  But it was hours ago.”

Mrs. Assingham thought.  “The more danger then of his coming in and finding me here.  I don’t know, you see, what you now consider that you’ve ascertained; nor anything of the connexion with it of that object that you declare so damning.”  Her eyes rested on this odd acquisition and then quitted it, went back to it and again turned from it:  it was inscrutable in its rather stupid elegance, and yet, from the moment one had thus appraised it, vivid and definite in its domination of the scene.  Fanny could no more overlook it now than she could have overlooked a lighted Christmas-tree; but nervously and all in vain she dipped into her mind for some floating reminiscence of it.  At the same time that this attempt left her blank she understood a good deal, she even not a little shared the Prince’s mystic apprehension.  The golden bowl put on, under consideration, a sturdy, a conscious perversity; as a “document,” somehow, it was ugly, though it might have a decorative grace.  “His finding me here in presence of it might be more flagrantly disagreeable—­for all of us—­than you intend or than would necessarily help us.  And I must take time, truly, to understand what it means.”

“You’re safe, as far as that goes,” Maggie returned; “you may take it from me that he won’t come in; and that I shall only find him below, waiting for me, when I go down to the carriage.”

Fanny Assingham took it from her, took it and more.  “We’re to sit together at the Ambassador’s then—­or at least you two are—­with this new complication thrust up before you, all unexplained; and to look at each other with faces that pretend, for the ghastly hour, not to be seeing it?”