lmost aggressively; it
was what she was reduced to--she had positively to place it.

"Ah, that as much as you please!"

Maggie said this and left it, but the tone of it had the next moment
determined in her friend a fresh reaction. "You think, both of you, so
abysmally and yet so quietly. But it's what will have saved you."

"Oh," Maggie returned, "it's what--from the moment they discovered we
could think at all--will have saved THEM. For they're the ones who are
saved," she went on. "We're the ones who are lost."

"Lost--?"

"Lost to each other--father and I." And then as her friend appeared to
demur, "Oh yes," Maggie quite lucidly declared, "lost to each other much
more, really, than Amerigo and Charlotte are; since for them it's just,
it's right, it's deserved, while for us it's only sad and strange and
not caused by our fault. But I don't know," she went on, "why I talk
about myself, for it's on father it really comes. I let him go," said
Maggie.

"You let him, but you don't make him."

"I take it from him," she answered.

"But what else can you do?"

"I take it from him," the Princess repeated. "I do what I knew from the
first I SHOULD do. I get off by giving him up."

"But if he gives you?" Mrs. Assingham presumed to object. "Doesn't it
moreover then," she asked, "complete the very purpose with which he
married--that of making you and leaving you more free?"

Maggie looked at her long. "Yes--I help him to do that."

Mrs. Assingham hesitated, but at last her bravery flared. "Why not call
it then frankly his complete success?"

"Well," said Maggie, "that's all that's left me to do."

"It's a success," her friend ingeniously developed, "with which you've
simply not interfered." And as if to show that she spoke without levity
Mrs. Assingham went further. "He has made it a success for THEM--!"

"Ah, there you are!" Maggie responsively mused. "Yes," she said the next
moment, "that's why Amerigo stays."

"Let alone it's why Charlotte goes." that Mrs. Assingham, and
emboldened, smiled "So he knows--?"

But Maggie hung back. "Amerigo--?" After which, however, she blushed--to
her companion's recognition.

"Your father. He knows what YOU know? I mean," Fanny faltered--"well,
how much does he know?" Maggie's silence and Maggie's eyes had in fact
arrested the push of the question--which, for a decent consistency, she
couldn't yet quite abandon. "What I should rather say is does he know
how much?" She fou