“Any one, I mean, but Fanny Assingham.”

“I should have supposed you had had by this time particular means of learning.  I don’t see,” she said, “why you ask me.”

Then, after an instant—­and only after an instant, as she saw—­he made out what she meant; and it gave her, all strangely enough, the still further light that Charlotte, for herself, knew as little as he had known.  The vision loomed, in this light, it fairly glared, for the few seconds—­the vision of the two others alone together at Fawns, and Charlotte, as one of them, having gropingly to go on, always not knowing and not knowing!  The picture flushed at the same time with all its essential colour—­ that of the so possible identity of her father’s motive and principle with her own.  He was “deep,” as Amerigo called it, so that no vibration of the still air should reach his daughter; just as she had earned that description by making and by, for that matter, intending still to make, her care for his serenity, or at any rate for the firm outer shell of his dignity, all marvellous enamel, her paramount law.  More strangely even than anything else, her husband seemed to speak now but to help her in this.  “I know nothing but what you tell me.”

“Then I’ve told you all I intended.  Find out the rest—!”

“Find it out—?” He waited.

She stood before him a moment—­it took that time to go on.  Depth upon depth of her situation, as she met his face, surged and sank within her; but with the effect somehow, once more, that they rather lifted her than let her drop.  She had her feet somewhere, through it all—­it was her companion, absolutely, who was at sea.  And she kept her feet; she pressed them to what was beneath her.  She went over to the bell beside the chimney and gave a ring that he could but take as a summons for her maid.  It stopped everything for the present; it was an intimation to him to go and dress.  But she had to insist.  “Find out for yourself!”

PART FIFTH

XXXV

After the little party was again constituted at Fawns—­which had taken, for completeness, some ten days—­Maggie naturally felt herself still more possessed, in spirit, of everything that had last happened in London.  There was a phrase that came back to her from old American years:  she was having, by that idiom, the time of her life—­she knew it by the perpetual throb of this sense of possession, which was almost too violent either to recognise or to hide.  It was as if she had come out—­that was her most general consciousness; out of a dark tunnel, a dense wood, or even simply a smoky room, and had thereby, at least, for going on, the advantage of air in her lungs.  It was as if she were somehow at last gathering in the fruits of patience; she had either been really more patient than she had known at the time, or had been so for longer:  the change brought about by itself as great a difference of view