Maggie had sat down, with the others, to viands artfully iced, to the slow circulation of precious tinkling jugs, to marked reserves of reference in many directions—­poor Fanny Assingham herself scarce thrusting her nose out of the padded hollow into which she had withdrawn.  A consensus of languor, which might almost have been taken for a community of dread, ruled the scene—­relieved only by the fitful experiments of Father Mitchell, good holy, hungry man, a trusted and overworked London friend and adviser, who had taken, for a week or two, the light neighbouring service, local rites flourishing under Maggie’s munificence, and was enjoying, as a convenience, all the bounties of the house.  He conversed undiscouraged, Father Mitchell—­ conversed mainly with the indefinite, wandering smile of the entertainers, and the Princess’s power to feel him on the whole a blessing for these occasions was not impaired by what was awkward in her consciousness of having, from the first of her trouble, really found her way without his guidance.  She asked herself at times if he suspected how more than subtly, how perversely, she had dispensed with him, and she balanced between visions of all he must privately have guessed and certitudes that he had guessed nothing whatever.  He might nevertheless have been so urbanely filling up gaps, at present, for the very reason that his instinct, sharper than the expression of his face, had sufficiently served him—­made him aware of the thin ice, figuratively speaking, and of prolongations of tension, round about him, mostly foreign to the circles in which luxury was akin to virtue.  Some day in some happier season, she would confess to him that she hadn’t confessed, though taking so much on her conscience; but just now she was carrying in her weak, stiffened hand a glass filled to the brim, as to which she had recorded a vow that no drop should overflow.  She feared the very breath of a better wisdom, the jostle of the higher light, of heavenly help itself; and, in addition, however that might be, she drew breath this afternoon, as never yet, in an element heavy to oppression.  Something grave had happened, somehow and somewhere, and she had, God knew, her choice of suppositions:  her heart stood still when she wondered above all if the cord mightn’t at last have snapped between her husband and her father.  She shut her eyes for dismay at the possibility of such a passage—­there moved before them the procession of ugly forms it might have taken.  “Find out for yourself!” she had thrown to Amerigo, for her last word, on the question of who else “knew,” that night of the breaking of the Bowl; and she flattered herself that she hadn’t since then helped him, in her clear consistency, by an inch.  It was what she had given him, all these weeks, to be busy with, and she had again and again lain awake for the obsession of this sense of his uncertainty ruthlessly and endlessly playing with his dignity.  She had handed him