“By her ignorance.”  Fanny wondered.  “A torment—?”

“A torment,” said Maggie with tears in her eyes.

Her companion a moment watched them.  But the Prince then—?”

“How is he held?” Maggie asked.

“How is he held?”

“Oh, I can’t tell you that!” And the Princess again broke off.

XLI

A telegram, in Charlotte’s name, arrived early—­“We shall come and ask you for tea at five, if convenient to you.  Am wiring for the Assinghams to lunch.”  This document, into which meanings were to be read, Maggie promptly placed before her husband, adding the remark that her father and his wife, who would have come up the previous night or that morning, had evidently gone to an hotel.  The Prince was in his “own” room, where he often sat now alone; half-a-dozen open newspapers, the “Figaro” notably, as well as the “Times,” were scattered about him; but, with a cigar in his teeth and a visible cloud on his brow, he appeared actually to be engaged in walking to and fro.  Never yet, on thus approaching him—­for she had done it of late, under one necessity or another, several times—­had a particular impression so greeted her; supremely strong, for some reason, as he turned quickly round on her entrance.  The reason was partly the look in his face—­a suffusion like the flush of fever, which brought back to her Fanny Assingham’s charge, recently uttered under that roof, of her “thinking” too impenetrably.  The word had remained with her and made her think still more; so that, at first, as she stood there, she felt responsible for provoking on his part an irritation of suspense at which she had not aimed.  She had been going about him these three months, she perfectly knew, with a maintained idea—­of which she had never spoken to him; but what had at last happened was that his way of looking at her, on occasion, seemed a perception of the presence not of one idea, but of fifty, variously prepared for uses with which he somehow must reckon.  She knew herself suddenly, almost strangely, glad to be coming to him, at this hour, with nothing more abstract than a telegram; but even after she had stepped into his prison under her pretext, while her eyes took in his face and then embraced the four walls that enclosed his restlessness, she recognised the virtual identity of his condition with that aspect of Charlotte’s situation for which, early in the summer and in all the amplitude of a great residence, she had found, with so little seeking, the similitude of the locked cage.  He struck her as caged, the man who couldn’t now without an instant effect on her sensibility give an instinctive push to the door she had not completely closed behind her.  He had been turning twenty ways, for impatiences all his own, and when she was once shut in with him it was yet again as if she had come to him in his more than monastic cell to offer him light or food.  There was a difference none the less, between his captivity and Charlotte’s—­the