“But don’t they, how you were and how you are,” Maggie asked, “come practically to the same thing?” The elder woman’s words had struck her own ear as in the tone, now mistimed, of their recent, but all too factitious understanding, arrived at in hours when, as there was nothing susceptible of proof, there was nothing definitely to disprove.  The situation had changed by—­well, by whatever there was, by the outbreak of the definite; and this could keep Maggie at least firm.  She was firm enough as she pursued.  “It was on the whole thing that Amerigo married me.”  With which her eyes had their turn again at her damnatory piece.  “And it was on that—­it was on that!” But they came back to her visitor.  “And it was on it all that father married her.”

Her visitor took it as might be.  “They both married—­ah, that you must believe!—­with the highest intentions.”

“Father did certainly!” And then, at the renewal of this consciousness, it all rolled over her.  “Ah, to thrust such things on us, to do them here between us and with us, day after day, and in return, in return—!  To do it to him—­to him, to him!”

Fanny hesitated.  “You mean it’s for him you most suffer?” And then as the Princess, after a look, but turned away, moving about the room—­which made the question somehow seem a blunder—­“I ask,” she continued, “because I think everything, everything we now speak of, may be for him, really may be made for him, quite as if it hadn’t been.”

But Maggie had, the next moment faced about as if without hearing her.  “Father did it for me—­did it all and only for me.”

Mrs. Assingham, with a certain promptness, threw up her head; but she faltered again before she spoke.  “Well—!”

It was only an intended word, but Maggie showed after an instant that it had reached her.  “Do you mean that that’s the reason, that that’s A reason—?”

Fanny at first, however, feeling the response in this, didn’t say all she meant; she said for the moment something else instead.  “He did it for you—­largely at least for you.  And it was for you that I did, in my smaller, interested way—­well, what I could do.  For I could do something,” she continued; “I thought I saw your interest as he himself saw it.  And I thought I saw Charlotte’s.  I believed in her.”

“And I believed in her,” said Maggie.

Mrs. Assingham waited again; but she presently pushed on.  “She believed then in herself.”

“Ah?” Maggie murmured.

Something exquisite, faintly eager, in the prompt simplicity of it, supported her friend further.  “And the Prince believed.  His belief was real.  Just as he believed in himself.”

Maggie spent a minute in taking it from her.  “He believed in himself?”

“Just as I too believed in him.  For I absolutely did, Maggie.”  To which Fanny then added:  “And I believe in him yet.  I mean,” she subjoined—­“well, I mean I do.”