hat you're jealous of Charlotte?"

"Do you mean whether I hate her?"--and Maggie thought. "No; not on
account of father."

"Ah," Mrs. Assingham returned, "that isn't what one would suppose. What
I ask is if you're jealous on account of your husband."

"Well," said Maggie presently, "perhaps that may be all. If I'm unhappy
I'm jealous; it must come to the same thing; and with you, at least, I'm
not afraid of the word. If I'm jealous, don't you see? I'm tormented,"
she went on--"and all the more if I'm helpless. And if I'm both helpless
AND tormented I stuff my pocket-handkerchief into my mouth, I keep
it there, for the most part, night and day, so as not to be heard too
indecently moaning. Only now, with you, at last, I can't keep it longer;
I've pulled it out, and here I am fairly screaming at you. They're
away," she wound up, "so they can't hear; and I'm, by a miracle of
arrangement, not at luncheon with father at home. I live in the midst of
miracles of arrangement, half of which I admit, are my own; I go about
on tiptoe, I watch for every sound, I feel every breath, and yet I try
all the while to seem as smooth as old satin dyed rose-colour. Have you
ever thought of me," she asked, "as really feeling as I do?"

Her companion, conspicuously, required to be clear. "Jealous, unhappy,
tormented--? No," said Mrs. Assingham; "but at the same time--and though
you may laugh at me for it!--I'm bound to confess that I've never been
so awfully sure of what I may call knowing you. Here you are indeed, as
you say--such a deep little person! I've never imagined your existence
poisoned, and, since you wish to know if I consider that it need
be, I've not the least difficulty in speaking on the spot. Nothing,
decidedly, strikes me as more unnecessary."

For a minute after this they remained face to face; Maggie had sprung
up while her friend sat enthroned, and, after moving to and fro in
her intensity, now paused to receive the light she had invoked. It had
accumulated, considerably, by this time, round Mrs. Assingham's ample
presence, and it made, even to our young woman's own sense, a medium in
which she could at last take a deeper breath. "I've affected you, these
months--and these last weeks in especial--as quiet and natural and
easy?"

But it was a question that took, not imperceptibly, some answering.
"You've never affected me, from the first hour I beheld you, as anything
but--in a way all your own--absolutely good and s