“Wasn’t it quite enough?”

“Oh, love,” she bridled, “that’s for you to have judged!”

“Then I have judged,” said Maggie—­“I did judge.  I made sure he understood—­then I let him alone.”

Mrs. Assingham wondered.  “But he didn’t explain—?”

“Explain?  Thank God, no!” Maggie threw back her head as with horror at the thought, then the next moment added:  “And I didn’t, either.”

The decency of pride in it shed a cold little light—­yet as from heights at the base of which her companion rather panted.  “But if he neither denies nor confesses—?”

“He does what’s a thousand times better—­he lets it alone.  He does,” Maggie went on, “as he would do; as I see now that I was sure he would.  He lets me alone.”

Fanny Assingham turned it over.  “Then how do you know so where, as you say, you ’are’?”

“Why, just by that.  I put him in possession of the difference; the difference made, about me, by the fact that I hadn’t been, after all—­though with a wonderful chance, I admitted, helping me—­too stupid to have arrived at knowledge.  He had to see that I’m changed for him—­quite changed from the idea of me that he had so long been going on with.  It became a question then of his really taking in the change—­and what I now see is that he is doing so.”

Fanny followed as she could.  “Which he shows by letting you, as you say, alone?”

Maggie looked at her a minute.  “And by letting her.”

Mrs. Assingham did what she might to embrace it—­checked a little, however, by a thought that was the nearest approach she could have, in this almost too large air, to an inspiration.  “Ah, but does Charlotte let him?”

“Oh, that’s another affair—­with which I’ve practically nothing to do.  I dare say, however, she doesn’t.”  And the Princess had a more distant gaze for the image evoked by the question.  “I don’t in fact well see how she can.  But the point for me is that he understands.”

“Yes,” Fanny Assingham cooed, “understands—?”

“Well, what I want.  I want a happiness without a hole in it big enough for you to poke in your finger.”

“A brilliant, perfect surface—­to begin with at least.  I see.”

“The golden bowl—­as it was to have been.”  And Maggie dwelt musingly on this obscured figure.  “The bowl with all our happiness in it.  The bowl without the crack.”

For Mrs. Assingham too the image had its force, and the precious object shone before her again, reconstituted, plausible, presentable.  But wasn’t there still a piece missing?  “Yet if he lets you alone and you only let him—?”

“Mayn’t our doing so, you mean, be noticed?—­mayn’t it give us away?  Well, we hope not—­we try not—­we take such care.  We alone know what’s between us—­we and you; and haven’t you precisely been struck, since you’ve been here,” Maggie asked, “with our making so good a show?”