ich, with or without exactness, the effect of each successive minute
in the place was to put her more in presence of what Maggie herself saw.
Maggie herself saw the truth, and that was really, while they remained
there together, enough for Mrs. Assingham's relation to it. There was
a force in the Princess's mere manner about it that made the detail of
what she knew a matter of minor importance. Fanny had in fact something
like a momentary shame over her own need of asking for this detail.
"I don't pretend to repudiate," she said after a little, "my own
impressions of the different times I suppose you speak of; any more,"
she added, "than I can forget what difficulties and, as it constantly
seemed to me, what dangers, every course of action--whatever I should
decide upon--made for me. I tried, I tried hard, to act for the best.
And, you know," she next pursued, while, at the sound of her own
statement, a slow courage and even a faint warmth of conviction came
back to her--"and, you know, I believe it's what I shall turn out to
have done."

This produced a minute during which their interchange, though quickened
and deepened, was that of silence only, and the long, charged look; all
of which found virtual consecration when Maggie at last spoke. "I'm sure
you tried to act for the best."

It kept Fanny Assingham again a minute in silence. "I never thought,
dearest, you weren't an angel."

Not, however, that this alone was much help! "It was up to the very eve,
you see," the Princess went on--"up to within two or three days of our
marriage. That, THAT, you know--!" And she broke down for strangely
smiling.

"Yes, as I say, it was while she was with me. But I didn't know it. That
is," said Fanny Assingham, "I didn't know of anything in particular." It
sounded weak--that she felt; but she had really her point to make. "What
I mean is that I don't know, for knowledge, now, anything I didn't then.
That's how I am." She still, however, floundered. "I mean it's how I
WAS."

"But don't they, how you were and how you are," Maggie asked, "come
practically to the same thing?" The elder woman's words had struck
her own ear as in the tone, now mistimed, of their recent, but all too
factitious understanding, arrived at in hours when, as there was nothing
susceptible of proof, there was nothing definitely to disprove. The
situation had changed by--well, by whatever there was, by the outbreak
of the definite; and this could keep Maggi