hours, after her dinner, a fresh contingent, the whole list of her
apparent London acquaintance--which was again a thing in the manner of
little princesses for whom the princely art was a matter of course. That
was what she was learning to do, to fill out as a matter of course her
appointed, her expected, her imposed character; and, though there were
latent considerations that somewhat interfered with the lesson, she
was having to-night an inordinate quantity of practice, none of it so
successful as when, quite wittingly, she directed it at Lady Castledean,
who was reduced by it at last to an unprecedented state of passivity.
The perception of this high result caused Mrs. Assingham fairly to flush
with responsive joy; she glittered at her young friend, from moment to
moment, quite feverishly; it was positively as if her young friend had,
in some marvellous, sudden, supersubtle way, become a source of succour
to herself, become beautifully, divinely retributive. The intensity of
the taste of these registered phenomena was in fact that somehow, by
a process and through a connexion not again to be traced, she so
practised, at the same time, on Amerigo and Charlotte--with only the
drawback, her constant check and second-thought, that she concomitantly
practised perhaps still more on her father.

This last was a danger indeed that, for much of the ensuing time,
had its hours of strange beguilement--those at which her sense for
precautions so suffered itself to lapse that she felt her communion with
him more intimate than any other. It COULDN'T but pass between them that
something singular was happening--so much as this she again and again
said to herself; whereby the comfort of it was there, after all, to be
noted, just as much as the possible peril, and she could think of the
couple they formed together as groping, with sealed lips, but with
mutual looks that had never been so tender, for some freedom, some
fiction, some figured bravery, under which they might safely talk of
it. The moment was to come--and it finally came with an effect as
penetrating as the sound that follows the pressure of an electric
button--when she read the least helpful of meanings into the agitation
she had created. The merely specious description of their case would
have been that, after being for a long time, as a family, delightfully,
uninterruptedly happy, they had still had a new felicity to discover;
a felicity for which, blessedly, her fathe