with
Charlotte, when you spent those hours with her, unknown to me, a day or
two before our marriage. It was shown you both, but you didn't take
it; you left it for me, and I came upon it, extraordinarily, through
happening to go into the same shop on Monday last; in walking home, in
prowling about to pick up some small old thing for father's birthday,
after my visit to the Museum, my appointment there with Mr. Crichton,
of which I told you. It was shown me, and I was struck with it and took
it--knowing nothing about it at the time. What I now know I've learned
since--I learned this afternoon, a couple of hours ago; receiving from
it naturally a great impression. So there it is--in its three pieces.
You can handle them--don't be afraid--if you want to make sure the thing
is the thing you and Charlotte saw together. Its having come apart makes
an unfortunate difference for its beauty, its artistic value, but none
for anything else. Its other value is just the same--I mean that of its
having given me so much of the truth about you. I don't therefore so
much care what becomes of it now--unless perhaps you may yourself, when
you come to think, have some good use for it. In that case," Maggie
wound up, "we can easily take the pieces with us to Fawns."

It was wonderful how she felt, by the time she had seen herself through
this narrow pass, that she had really achieved something--that she was
emerging a little, in fine, with the prospect less contracted. She had
done for him, that is, what her instinct enjoined; had laid a basis not
merely momentary on which he could meet her. When, by the turn of his
head, he did finally meet her, this was the last thing that glimmered
out of his look; but it came into sight, none the less, as a perception
of his distress and almost as a question of his eyes; so that, for still
another minute, before he committed himself, there occurred between them
a kind of unprecedented moral exchange over which her superior lucidity
presided. It was not, however, that when he did commit himself the show
was promptly portentous. "But what in the world has Fanny Assingham had
to do with it?"

She could verily, out of all her smothered soreness, almost have smiled:
his question so affected her as giving the whole thing up to her. But
it left her only to go the straighter. "She has had to do with it that
I immediately sent for her and that she immediately came. She was the
first person I wanted to see--be