ad for Mrs. Assingham--and whether all consciously
or not--the oddest pathos of simplicity. "Oh yes, dear, of course I
remember how she came back from America--and how she stayed with US, and
what view one had of it."

Maggie's eyes still, all the time, pressed and penetrated; so that,
during a moment, just here, she might have given the little flare, have
made the little pounce, of asking what then "one's" view had been. To
the small flash of this eruption Fanny stood, for her minute, wittingly
exposed; but she saw it as quickly cease to threaten--quite saw the
Princess, even though in all her pain, refuse, in the interest of their
strange and exalted bargain, to take advantage of the opportunity
for planting the stab of reproach, the opportunity thus coming all of
itself. She saw her--or she believed she saw her--look at her chance
for straight denunciation, look at it and then pass it by; and she felt
herself, with this fact, hushed well-nigh to awe at the lucid higher
intention that no distress could confound and that no discovery--since
it was, however obscurely, a case of "discovery"--could make less
needful. These seconds were brief--they rapidly passed; but they
lasted long enough to renew our friend's sense of her own extraordinary
undertaking, the function again imposed on her, the answerability again
drilled into her, by this intensity of intimation. She was reminded of
the terms on which she was let off--her quantity of release having made
its sufficient show in that recall of her relation to Charlotte's
old reappearance; and deep within the whole impression glowed--ah, so
inspiringly when it came to that! her steady view, clear from the first,
of the beauty of her companion's motive. It was like a fresh sacrifice
for a larger conquest "Only see me through now, do it in the face of
this and in spite of it, and I leave you a hand of which the freedom
isn't to be said!" The aggravation of fear--or call it, apparently, of
knowledge--had jumped straight into its place as an aggravation above
all for her father; the effect of this being but to quicken to passion
her reasons for making his protectedness, or in other words the forms
of his ignorance, still the law of her attitude and the key to her
solution. She kept as tight hold of these reasons and these forms, in
her confirmed horror, as the rider of a plunging horse grasps his seat
with his knees; and she might absolutely have been putting it to her
guest that