retreat, just long enough to be recognised.  What she had recognised in it was his recognition, the result of his having been forced, by the flush of their visitor’s attitude and the unextinguished report of her words, to take account of the flagrant signs of the accident, of the incident, on which he had unexpectedly dropped.  He had, not unnaturally, failed to see this occurrence represented by the three fragments of an object apparently valuable which lay there on the floor and which, even across the width of the room, his kept interval, reminded him, unmistakably though confusedly, of something known, some other unforgotten image.  That was a mere shock, that was a pain—­as if Fanny’s violence had been a violence redoubled and acting beyond its intention, a violence calling up the hot blood as a blow across the mouth might have called it.  Maggie knew as she turned away from him that she didn’t want his pain; what she wanted was her own simple certainty—­not the red mark of conviction flaming there in his beauty.  If she could have gone on with bandaged eyes she would have liked that best; if it were a question of saying what she now, apparently, should have to, and of taking from him what he would say, any blindness that might wrap it would be the nearest approach to a boon.

She went in silence to where her friend—­never, in intention, visibly, so much her friend as at that moment—­had braced herself to so amazing an energy, and there, under Amerigo’s eyes, she picked up the shining pieces.  Bedizened and jewelled, in her rustling finery, she paid, with humility of attitude, this prompt tribute to order—­only to find, however, that she could carry but two of the fragments at once.  She brought them over to the chimney-piece, to the conspicuous place occupied by the cup before Fanny’s appropriation of it, and, after laying them carefully down, went back for what remained, the solid detached foot.  With this she returned to the mantel-shelf, placing it with deliberation in the centre and then, for a minute, occupying herself as with the attempt to fit the other morsels.  After she had squared again her little objects on the chimney, she was within an ace, in fact, of turning on him with that appeal; besides its being lucid for her, all the while, that the occasion was passing, that they were dining out, that he wasn’t dressed, and that, though she herself was, she was yet, in all probability, so horribly red in the face and so awry, in many ways, with agitation, that in view of the Ambassador’s company, of possible comments and constructions, she should need, before her glass, some restoration of appearances.