d estimate of the
evidence with which she had been--so admirably, she felt as she looked
at him--inspired to deal. She looked at him and looked at him--there
were so many things she wanted, on the spot, to say. But Maggie was
looking too--and was moreover looking at them both; so that these
things, for the elder woman, quickly enough reduced themselves to one.
She met his question--not too late, since, in their silence, it had
remained in the air. Gathering herself to go, leaving the golden bowl
split into three pieces on the ground, she simply referred him to his
wife. She should see them later, they would all meet soon again; and
meanwhile, as to what Maggie had meant--she said, in her turn, from the
door--why, Maggie herself was doubtless by this time ready to tell him.

XXXIV

Left with her husband, Maggie, however, for the time, said nothing; she
only felt, on the spot, a strong, sharp wish not to see his face again
till he should have had a minute to arrange it. She had seen it enough
for her temporary clearness and her next movement--seen it as it showed
during the stare of surprise that followed his entrance. Then it was
that she knew how hugely expert she had been made, for judging it
quickly, by that vision of it, indelibly registered for reference, that
had flashed a light into her troubled soul the night of his late return
from Matcham. The expression worn by it at that juncture, for however
few instants, had given her a sense of its possibilities, one of the
most relevant of which might have been playing up for her, before
the consummation of Fanny Assingham's retreat, just long enough to
be recognised. What she had recognised in it was HIS recognition,
the result of his having been forced, by the flush of their visitor's
attitude and the unextinguished report of her words, to take account
of the flagrant signs of the accident, of the incident, on which he
had unexpectedly dropped. He had, not unnaturally, failed to see this
occurrence represented by the three fragments of an object apparently
valuable which lay there on the floor and which, even across the width
of the room, his kept interval, reminded him, unmistakably though
confusedly, of something known, some other unforgotten image. That was a
mere shock, that was a pain--as if Fanny's violence had been a violence
redoubled and acting beyond its intention, a violence calling up the hot
blood as a blow across the mout