Her friend hesitated.  “To your father?”

But it made her hesitate too; she wouldn’t speak of her father directly.  “To everyone.  To her—­now that you understand.”

It held poor Fanny again in wonder.  “To Charlotte—­yes:  if there’s so much beneath it, for you, and if it’s all such a plan.  That makes it hang together it makes you hang together.”  She fairly exhaled her admiration.  “You’re like nobody else—­you’re extraordinary.”

Maggie met it with appreciation, but with a reserve.  “No, I’m not extraordinary—­but I am, for every one, quiet.”

“Well, that’s just what is extraordinary.  ‘Quiet’ is more than I am, and you leave me far behind.”  With which, again, for an instant, Mrs. Assingham frankly brooded. “’Now that I understand,’ you say—­but there’s one thing I don’t understand.”  And the next minute, while her companion waited, she had mentioned it.  “How can Charlotte, after all, not have pressed him, not have attacked him about it?  How can she not have asked him—­asked him on his honour, I mean—­if you know?”

“How can she ‘not’?  Why, of course,” said the Princess limpidly, “she must!”

“Well then—?”

“Well then, you think, he must have told her?  Why, exactly what I mean,” said Maggie, “is that he will have done nothing of the sort; will, as I say, have maintained the contrary.”

Fanny Assingham weighed it.  “Under her direct appeal for the truth?”

“Under her direct appeal for the truth.”

“Her appeal to his honour?”

“Her appeal to his honour.  That’s my point.”

Fanny Assingham braved it.  “For the truth as from him to her?”

“From him to any one.”

Mrs. Assingham’s face lighted.  “He’ll simply, he’ll insistently have lied?”

Maggie brought it out roundly.  “He’ll simply, he’ll insistently have lied.”

It held again her companion, who next, however, with a single movement, throwing herself on her neck, overflowed.  “Oh, if you knew how you help me!”

Maggie had liked her to understand, so far as this was possible; but had not been slow to see afterwards how the possibility was limited, when one came to think, by mysteries she was not to sound.  This inability in her was indeed not remarkable, inasmuch as the Princess herself, as we have seen, was only now in a position to boast of touching bottom.  Maggie lived, inwardly, in a consciousness that she could but partly open even to so good a friend, and her own visitation of the fuller expanse of which was, for that matter, still going on.  They had been duskier still, however, these recesses of her imagination—­that, no doubt, was what might at present be said for them.  She had looked into them, on the eve of her leaving town, almost without penetration:  she had made out in those hours, and also, of a truth, during the days which immediately followed, little more than the strangeness of a relation