be afraid—­if you want to make sure the thing is the thing you and Charlotte saw together.  Its having come apart makes an unfortunate difference for its beauty, its artistic value, but none for anything else.  Its other value is just the same—­I mean that of its having given me so much of the truth about you.  I don’t therefore so much care what becomes of it now—­unless perhaps you may yourself, when you come to think, have some good use for it.  In that case,” Maggie wound up, “we can easily take the pieces with us to Fawns.”

It was wonderful how she felt, by the time she had seen herself through this narrow pass, that she had really achieved something—­that she was emerging a little, in fine, with the prospect less contracted.  She had done for him, that is, what her instinct enjoined; had laid a basis not merely momentary on which he could meet her.  When, by the turn of his head, he did finally meet her, this was the last thing that glimmered out of his look; but it came into sight, none the less, as a perception of his distress and almost as a question of his eyes; so that, for still another minute, before he committed himself, there occurred between them a kind of unprecedented moral exchange over which her superior lucidity presided.  It was not, however, that when he did commit himself the show was promptly portentous.  “But what in the world has Fanny Assingham had to do with it?”

She could verily, out of all her smothered soreness, almost have smiled:  his question so affected her as giving the whole thing up to her.  But it left her only to go the straighter.  “She has had to do with it that I immediately sent for her and that she immediately came.  She was the first person I wanted to see—­ because I knew she would know.  Know more about what I had learned, I mean, than I could make out for myself.  I made out as much as I could for myself—­that I also wanted to have done; but it didn’t, in spite of everything, take me very far, and she has really been a help.  Not so much as she would like to be—­not so much as, poor dear, she just now tried to be; yet she has done her very best for you—­never forget that!—­and has kept me along immeasurably better than I should have been able to come without her.  She has gained me time; and that, these three months, don’t you see? has been everything.”

She had said “Don’t you see?” on purpose, and was to feel the next moment that it had acted.  “These three months’?” the Prince asked.

“Counting from the night you came home so late from Matcham.  Counting from the hours you spent with Charlotte at Gloucester; your visit to the cathedral—­which you won’t have forgotten describing to me in so much detail.  For that was the beginning of my being sure.  Before it I had been sufficiently in doubt.  Sure,” Maggie developed, “of your having, and of your having for a long time had, two relations with Charlotte.”

He stared, a little at sea, as he took it up.  “Two—?”