Something in the tone of it gave it a sense, or an ambiguity, almost foolish—­leaving Maggie to feel, as in a flash, how such a consequence, a foredoomed infelicity, partaking of the ridiculous even in one of the cleverest, might be of the very essence of the penalty of wrong-doing.  “Oh, you may have had fifty—­had the same relation with her fifty times!  It’s of the number of kinds of relation with her that I speak—­a number that doesn’t matter, really, so long as there wasn’t only one kind, as father and I supposed.  One kind,” she went on, “was there before us; we took that fully for granted, as you saw, and accepted it.  We never thought of there being another, kept out of our sight.  But after the evening I speak of I knew there was something else.  As I say, I had, before that, my idea—­which you never dreamed I had.  From the moment I speak of it had more to go upon, and you became yourselves, you and she, vaguely, yet uneasily, conscious of the difference.  But it’s within these last hours that I’ve most seen where we are; and as I’ve been in communication with Fanny Assingham about my doubts, so I wanted to let her know my certainty—­with the determination of which, however, you must understand, she has had nothing to do.  She defends you,” Maggie remarked.

He had given her all his attention, and with this impression for her, again, that he was, in essence, fairly reaching out to her for time—­time, only time—­she could sufficiently imagine, and to whatever strangeness, that he absolutely liked her to talk, even at the cost of his losing almost everything else by it.  It was still, for a minute, as if he waited for something worse; wanted everything that was in her to come out, any definite fact, anything more precisely nameable, so that he too—­as was his right—­should know where he was.  What stirred in him above all, while he followed in her face the clear train of her speech, must have been the impulse to take up something she put before him that he was yet afraid directly to touch.  He wanted to make free with it, but had to keep his hands off—­for reasons he had already made out; and the discomfort of his privation yearned at her out of his eyes with an announcing gleam of the fever, the none too tolerable chill, of specific recognition.  She affected him as speaking more or less for her father as well, and his eyes might have been trying to hypnotise her into giving him the answer without his asking the question.  “Had he his idea, and has he now, with you, anything more?”—­those were the words he had to hold himself from not speaking and that she would as yet, certainly, do nothing to make easy.  She felt with her sharpest thrill how he was straitened and tied, and with the miserable pity of it her present conscious purpose of keeping him so could none the less perfectly accord.  To name her father, on any such basis of anxiety, of compunction, would be to do the impossible thing, to do neither more nor less than give Charlotte away.