Maggie looked at her with a face that might have been the one she was preparing. “‘Unexplained,’ my dear?  Quite the contrary—­ explained:  fully, intensely, admirably explained, with nothing really to add.  My own love”—­she kept it up—­“I don’t want anything more.  I’ve plenty to go upon and to do with, as it is.”

Fanny Assingham stood there in her comparative darkness, with her links, verily, still missing; but the most acceptable effect of this was, singularly, as yet, a cold fear of getting nearer the fact.  “But when you come home—?  I mean he’ll come up with you again.  Won’t he see it then?”

On which Maggie gave her, after an instant’s visible thought, the strangest of slow headshakes.  “I don’t know.  Perhaps he’ll never see it—­if it only stands there waiting for him.  He may never again,” said the Princess, “come into this room.”

Fanny more deeply wondered, “Never again?  Oh—!”

“Yes, it may be.  How do I know?  With this!” she quietly went on.  She had not looked again at the incriminating piece, but there was a marvel to her friend in the way the little word representing it seemed to express and include for her the whole of her situation.  “Then you intend not to speak to him—?”

Maggie waited.  “To ’speak’—?”

“Well, about your having it and about what you consider that it represents.”

“Oh, I don’t know that I shall speak—­if he doesn’t.  But his keeping away from me because of that—­what will that be but to speak?  He can’t say or do more.  It won’t be for me to speak,” Maggie added in a different tone, one of the tones that had already so penetrated her guest.  “It will be for me to listen.”

Mrs. Assingham turned it over.  “Then it all depends on that object that you regard, for your reasons, as evidence?”

“I think I may say that I depend on it.  I can’t,” said Maggie, “treat it as nothing now.”

Mrs. Assingham, at this, went closer to the cup on the chimney—­ quite liking to feel that she did so, moreover, without going closer to her companion’s vision.  She looked at the precious thing—­if precious it was—­found herself in fact eyeing it as if, by her dim solicitation, to draw its secret from it rather than suffer the imposition of Maggie’s knowledge.  It was brave and rich and firm, with its bold deep hollow; and, without this queer torment about it, would, thanks to her love of plenty of yellow, figure to her as an enviable ornament, a possession really desirable.  She didn’t touch it, but if after a minute she turned away from it the reason was, rather oddly and suddenly, in her fear of doing so.  “Then it all depends on the bowl?  I mean your future does?  For that’s what it comes to, I judge.”