h might have called it. Maggie knew as
she turned away from him that she didn't want his pain; what she wanted
was her own simple certainty--not the red mark of conviction flaming
there in his beauty. If she could have gone on with bandaged eyes she
would have liked that best; if it were a question of saying what she
now, apparently, should have to, and of taking from him what he would
say, any blindness that might wrap it would be the nearest approach to a
boon.

She went in silence to where her friend--never, in intention, visibly,
so much her friend as at that moment--had braced herself to so amazing
an energy, and there, under Amerigo's eyes, she picked up the shining
pieces. Bedizened and jewelled, in her rustling finery, she paid,
with humility of attitude, this prompt tribute to order--only to find,
however, that she could carry but two of the fragments at once. She
brought them over to the chimney-piece, to the conspicuous place
occupied by the cup before Fanny's appropriation of it, and, after
laying them carefully down, went back for what remained, the solid
detached foot. With this she returned to the mantel-shelf, placing
it with deliberation in the centre and then, for a minute, occupying
herself as with the attempt to fit the other morsels. After she had
squared again her little objects on the chimney, she was within an ace,
in fact, of turning on him with that appeal; besides its being lucid for
her, all the while, that the occasion was passing, that they were dining
out, that he wasn't dressed, and that, though she herself was, she was
yet, in all probability, so horribly red in the face and so awry, in
many ways, with agitation, that in view of the Ambassador's company, of
possible comments and constructions, she should need, before her glass,
some restoration of appearances.

Amerigo, meanwhile, after all, could clearly make the most of her
having enjoined on him to wait--suggested it by the positive pomp of
her dealings with the smashed cup; to wait, that is, till she should
pronounce as Mrs. Assingham had promised for her. This delay, again,
certainly tested her presence of mind--though that strain was not
what presently made her speak. Keep her eyes, for the time, from her
husband's as she might, she soon found herself much more drivingly
conscious of the strain on his own wit. There was even a minute,
when her back was turned to him, during which she knew once more the
strangeness of her desire t