ouble in general and which let the
vague light play here and there upon gilt and crystal and colour, the
florid features, looming dimly, of Fanny's drawing-room. And the beauty
of what thus passed between them, passed with her cry of pain, with her
burst of tears, with his wonderment and his kindness and his comfort,
with the moments of their silence, above all, which might have
represented their sinking together, hand in hand, for a time, into the
mystic lake where he had begun, as we have hinted, by seeing her paddle
alone--the beauty of it was that they now could really talk better than
before, because the basis had at last, once for all, defined itself.
What was the basis, which Fanny absolutely exacted, but that Charlotte
and the Prince must be saved--so far as consistently speaking of them
as still safe might save them? It did save them, somehow, for Fanny's
troubled mind--for that was the nature of the mind of women. He conveyed
to her now, at all events, by refusing her no gentleness, that he had
sufficiently got the tip, and that the tip was all he had wanted. This
remained quite clear even when he presently reverted to what she had
told him of her recent passage with Maggie. "I don't altogether see,
you know, what you infer from it, or why you infer anything." When he
so expressed himself it was quite as if in possession of what they had
brought up from the depths.

XXIV

"I can't say more," this made his companion reply, "than that something
in her face, her voice and her whole manner acted upon me as nothing in
her had ever acted before; and just for the reason, above all, that I
felt her trying her very best--and her very best, poor duck, is very
good--to be quiet and natural. It's when one sees people who always ARE
natural making little pale, pathetic, blinking efforts for it--then
it is that one knows something's the matter. I can't describe my
impression--you would have had it for yourself. And the only thing
that ever CAN be the matter with Maggie is that. By 'that' I mean her
beginning to doubt. To doubt, for the first time," Mrs. Assingham wound
up, "of her wonderful little judgment of her wonderful little world."

It was impressive, Fanny's vision, and the Colonel, as if himself
agitated by it, took another turn of prowling. "To doubt of fidelity--to
doubt of friendship! Poor duck indeed! It will go hard with her. But
she'll put it all," he concluded, "on Charlotte