the fact. They had immediately, for him, their usual direct action: she must reassure him, he was made to feel, absolutely in her own way. He would adopt it and conform to it as soon as he should be able to make it out. The only thing was that it took such incalculable twists and turns. The twist seemed remarkable for instance as she developed her indication of what had come out in the afternoon. 'It was as if I knew better than ever what makes them—'
'What makes them?'—he pressed her as she fitfully dropped.
'Well, makes the Prince and Charlotte take it all as they do. It might well have been difficult to know HOW to take it; and they may even say for themselves that they were a long time trying to see. As I say, to-day,' she went on, 'it was as if I were suddenly, with a kind of horrible push, seeing through their eyes.' On which, as to shake off her perversity, Fanny Assingham sprang up. But she remained there, under the dim illumination, and while the Colonel, with his high, dry, spare look of 'type,' to which a certain conformity to the whiteness of inaccessible snows in his necktie, shirt-front and waistcoat gave a rigour of accent, waited, watching her, they might, at the late hour and in the still house, have been a pair of specious worldly adventurers, driven for relief, under sudden stress, to some grim midnight reckoning in an odd corner. Her attention moved mechanically over the objects of ornament disposed too freely on the walls of staircase and landing, as to which recognition, for the time, had lost both fondness and compunction. 'I can imagine the way it works,' she said; 'it's so easy to understand. Yet I don't want to be wrong,' she the next moment broke out 'I don't, I don't want to be wrong!'
'To make a mistake, you mean?'
Oh no, she meant nothing of the sort; she knew but too well what she meant. 'I don't make mistakes. But I perpetrate—in thought—crimes.' And she spoke with all intensity. 'I'm a most dreadful person. There are times when I seem not to mind a bit what I've done, or what I think or imagine or fear or accept; when I feel that I'd do it again—feel that I'd do things myself.'
'Ah, my dear!' the Colonel remarked in the coolness of debate.
'Yes, if you had driven me back on my 'nature.' Luckily for you you never have. You've done every thing else, but you've never done that. But what I really don't a bit want,' she declared, 'is to abet them or to protect them.'
Her companion turned this over. 'What is there to protect them from?—if, by your now so settled faith, they've done nothing that justly exposes them.'
And it in fact half pulled her up. 'Well, from a sudden scare. From the alarm, I mean, of what Maggie MAY think.'
'Yet if your whole idea is that Maggie thinks nothing—?'
She waited again. 'It isn't my 'whole' idea. Nothing is my 'whole' idea—for I felt to-day, as I tell you, that there's so much in the air.'
'Oh, in the air—!' the Colonel dryly breathed.
'Well, what's in the air always HAS—hasn't it?—to come down to the earth. And Maggie,' Mrs. Assingham continued, 'is a very curious little person. Since I was 'in,' this afternoon, for seeing more than I had ever done— well, I felt THAT too, for some reason, as I hadn't yet felt it.'
'For 'some' reason? For what reason?' And then, as his wife at first said nothing: 'Did she give any sign? Was she in any way different?'
'She's always so different from anyone else in the world that it's hard to say when she's different from herself. But she has made me,' said Fanny after an instant, 'think of her differently. She drove me home.'
'Home here?'
'First to Portland Place—on her leaving her father: since she does, once in a while, leave him. That was to keep me with her a little longer. But she kept the carriage and, after tea there, came with me herself back here. This was also for the same purpose. Then she went home, though I had brought her a message from the Prince that arranged their movements otherwise. He and Charlotte must have arrived—if they have arrived—expecting to drive together to Eaton Square and keep Maggie on to dinner there. She has everything there, you know—she has clothes.'
The Colonel didn't in fact know, but he gave it his apprehension. 'Oh, you mean a change?'
'Twenty changes, if you like—all sorts of things. She dresses, really, Maggie does, as much for her father—and she always did—as for her husband or for herself. She has her room in his house very much as she had it before she was married—and just as the boy has quite a second nursery there, in which Mrs. Noble, when she comes with him, makes herself, I assure you, at home. Si bien that if Charlotte, in her own house, so to speak, should wish a friend or two to stay with her, she really would be scarce able to put them up.'
It was a picture into which, as a thrifty entertainer himself, Bob Assingham could more or less enter. 'Maggie and the child spread so?'
'Maggie and the child spread so.'
Well, he considered. 'It IS rather rum,'
'That's all I claim'—she seemed thankful for the word. 'I don't say it's anything more—but it IS, distinctly, rum.'
Which, after an instant, the Colonel took up. ''More'? What more COULD it be?'
'It could be that she's unhappy, and that she takes her funny little way of consoling herself. For if she were unhappy'—Mrs. Assingham had figured it out—'that's just the way, I'm convinced, she would take. But how can she be unhappy, since—as I'm also convinced—she, in the midst of everything, adores her husband as much as ever?'
The Colonel at this brooded for a little at large. 'Then if she's so happy, please what's the matter?'
It made his wife almost spring at him. 'You think then she's secretly wretched?'
But he threw up his arms in deprecation. 'Ah, my dear, I give them up to YOU. I've nothing more to suggest.'
'Then it's not sweet of you.' She spoke at present as if he were frequently sweet. 'You admit that it is 'rum.''
