ct itself, either, into the cleared air of
conviction. In proportion as he was generous it had bitten into his
spirit, and more than once she had said to herself that to break the
spell she had cast upon him and that the polished old ivory of her
father's inattackable surface made so absolute, he would suddenly commit
some mistake or some violence, smash some windowpane for air, fail even
of one of his blest inveteracies of taste. In that way, fatally, he
would have put himself in the wrong--blighting by a single false step
the perfection of his outward show.

These shadows rose and fell for her while Father Mitchell prattled; with
other shadows as well, those that hung over Charlotte herself,
those that marked her as a prey to equal suspicions--to the idea, in
particular, of a change, such a change as she didn't dare to face, in
the relations of the two men. Or there were yet other possibilities, as
it seemed to Maggie; there were always too many, and all of them things
of evil when one's nerves had at last done for one all that nerves could
do; had left one in a darkness of prowling dangers that was like the
predicament of the night-watcher in a beast-haunted land who has no
more means for a fire. She might, with such nerves, have supposed almost
anything of any one; anything, almost, of poor Bob Assingham, condemned
to eternal observances and solemnly appreciating her father's wine;
anything, verily, yes, of the good priest, as he finally sat back with
fat folded hands and twiddled his thumbs on his stomach. The good priest
looked hard at the decanters, at the different dishes of dessert--he
eyed them, half-obliquely, as if THEY might have met him to-day, for
conversation, better than any one present. But the Princess had her
fancy at last about that too; she was in the midst of a passage, before
she knew it, between Father Mitchell and Charlotte--some approach
he would have attempted with her, that very morning perhaps, to the
circumstance of an apparent detachment, recently noted in her, from any
practice of devotion. He would have drawn from this, say, his artless
inference--taken it for a sign of some smothered inward trouble and
pointed, naturally, the moral that the way out of such straits was
not through neglect of the grand remedy. He had possibly prescribed
contrition--he had at any rate quickened in her the beat of that false
repose to which our young woman's own act had devoted her at her all so
deluded in