he made her think it would be so possible."

Fanny again hesitated. "The Prince made her think--?"

Maggie stared--she had meant her father. But her vision seemed to
spread. "They both made her think. She wouldn't have thought without
them."

"Yet Amerigo's good faith," Mrs. Assingham insisted, "was perfect. And
there was nothing, all the more," she added, "against your father's."

The remark, however, kept Maggie for a moment still. "Nothing perhaps
but his knowing that she knew."

"'Knew'?"

"That he was doing it, so much, for me. To what extent," she suddenly
asked of her friend, "do you think he was aware that she knew?"

"Ah, who can say what passes between people in such a relation? The only
thing one can be sure of is that he was generous." And Mrs. Assingham
conclusively smiled. "He doubtless knew as much as was right for
himself."

"As much, that is, as was right for her."

"Yes then--as was right for her. The point is," Fanny declared, "that,
whatever his knowledge, it made, all the way it went, for his good
faith."

Maggie continued to gaze, and her friend now fairly waited on her
successive movements. "Isn't the point, very considerably, that his good
faith must have been his faith in her taking almost as much interest in
me as he himself took?"

Fanny Assingham thought. "He recognised, he adopted, your long
friendship. But he founded on it no selfishness."

"No," said Maggie with still deeper consideration: "he counted her
selfishness out almost as he counted his own."

"So you may say."

"Very well," Maggie went on; "if he had none of his own, he invited her,
may have expected her, on her side, to have as little. And she may only
since have found that out."

Mrs. Assingham looked blank. "Since--?"

"And he may have become aware," Maggie pursued, "that she has found
it out. That she has taken the measure, since their marriage," she
explained, "of how much he had asked of her--more, say, than she had
understood at the time. He may have made out at last how such a demand
was, in the long run, to affect her."

"He may have done many things," Mrs. Assingham responded; "but there's
one thing he certainly won't have done. He'll never have shown that he
expected of her a quarter as much as she must have understood he was to
give."

"I've often wondered," Maggie mused, "what Charlotte really understood.
But it's one of the things she has never told me."

"Then as it's one of the things sh