“I shall go on,” Fanny Assingham a trifle grimly declared, “while there’s a scrap as big as your nail.  But we’re not yet, luckily, reduced only to that.”  She had another pause, holding the while the thread of that larger perception into which her view of Mrs. Verver’s obligation to Maggie had suddenly expanded. “even if her debt was not to the others—­even then it ought to be quite sufficiently to the Prince himself to keep her straight.  For what, really, did the Prince do,” she asked herself, “but generously trust her?  What did he do but take it from her that if she felt herself willing it was because she felt herself strong?  That creates for her, upon my word,” Mrs. Assingham pursued, “a duty of considering him, of honourably repaying his trust, which —­well, which she’ll be really a fiend if she doesn’t make the law of her conduct.  I mean of course his trust that she wouldn’t interfere with him—­expressed by his holding himself quiet at the critical time.”

The brougham was nearing home, and it was perhaps this sense of ebbing opportunity that caused the Colonel’s next meditation to flower in a fashion almost surprising to his wife.  They were united, for the most part, but by his exhausted patience; so that indulgent despair was generally, at the best, his note.  He at present, however, actually compromised with his despair to the extent of practically admitting that he had followed her steps.  He literally asked, in short, an intelligent, well nigh a sympathising, question.  “Gratitude to the Prince for not having put a spoke in her wheel—­that, you mean, should, taking it in the right way, be precisely the ballast of her boat?”

“Taking it in the right way.”  Fanny, catching at this gleam, emphasised the proviso.

“But doesn’t it rather depend on what she may most feel to be the right way?”

“No—­it depends on nothing.  Because there’s only one way—­for duty or delicacy.”

“Oh—­delicacy!” Bob Assingham rather crudely murmured.

“I mean the highest kind—­moral.  Charlotte’s perfectly capable of appreciating that.  By every dictate of moral delicacy she must let him alone.”

“Then you’ve made up your mind it’s all poor Charlotte?” he asked with an effect of abruptness.

The effect, whether intended or not, reached her—­brought her face short round.  It was a touch at which she again lost her balance, at which, somehow, the bottom dropped out of her recovered comfort.  “Then you’ve made up yours differently?  It really struck you that there is something?”

The movement itself, apparently, made him once more stand off.  He had felt on his nearer approach the high temperature of the question.  “Perhaps that’s just what she’s doing:  showing him how much she’s letting him alone—­pointing it out to him from day to day.”

“Did she point it out by waiting for him to-night on the stair-case in the manner you described to me?”