to find the golden flame—­oh, the golden flame!—­a mere handful of black ashes?” Our young woman so yielded, at moments, to what was insidious in these foredoomed ingenuities of her pity, that for minutes together, sometimes, the weight of a new duty seemed to rest upon her—­the duty of speaking before separation should constitute its chasm, of pleading for some benefit that might be carried away into exile like the last saved object of price of the emigre, the jewel wrapped in a piece of old silk and negotiable some day in the market of misery.

This imagined service to the woman who could no longer help herself was one of the traps set for Maggie’s spirit at every turn of the road; the click of which, catching and holding the divine faculty fast, was followed inevitably by a flutter, by a struggle of wings and even, as we may say, by a scattering of fine feathers.  For they promptly enough felt, these yearnings of thought and excursions of sympathy, the concussion that couldn’t bring them down—­the arrest produced by the so remarkably distinct figure that, at Fawns, for the previous weeks, was constantly crossing, in its regular revolution, the further end of any watched perspective.  Whoever knew, or whoever didn’t, whether or to what extent Charlotte, with natural business in Eaton Square, had shuffled other opportunities under that cloak, it was all matter for the kind of quiet ponderation the little man who so kept his wandering way had made his own.  It was part of the very inveteracy of his straw hat and his white waistcoat, of the trick of his hands in his pockets, of the detachment of the attention he fixed on his slow steps from behind his secure pince-nez.  The thing that never failed now as an item in the picture was that gleam of the silken noose, his wife’s immaterial tether, so marked to Maggie’s sense during her last month in the country.  Mrs. Verver’s straight neck had certainly not slipped it; nor had the other end of the long cord—­oh, quite conveniently long!—­disengaged its smaller loop from the hooked thumb that, with his fingers closed upon it, her husband kept out of sight.  To have recognised, for all its tenuity, the play of this gathered lasso might inevitably be to wonder with what magic it was twisted, to what tension subjected, but could never be to doubt either of its adequacy to its office or of its perfect durability.  These reminded states for the Princess were in fact states of renewed gaping.  So many things her father knew that she even yet didn’t!

All this, at present, with Mrs. Assingham, passed through her in quick vibrations.  She had expressed, while the revolution of her thought was incomplete, the idea of what Amerigo “ought,” on his side, in the premises, to be capable of, and then had felt her companion’s answering stare.  But she insisted on what she had meant.  “He ought to wish to see her—­and I mean in some protected and independent way, as he used to—­in case of her being herself able to manage it.  That,” said Maggie with the courage of her conviction, “he ought to be ready, he ought to be happy, he ought to feel himself sworn—­little as it is for the end of such a history!—­to take from her.  It’s as if he wished to get off without taking anything.”