cause I knew she would know. Know more
about what I had learned, I mean, than I could make out for myself. I
made out as much as I could for myself--that I also wanted to have done;
but it didn't, in spite of everything, take me very far, and she has
really been a help. Not so much as she would like to be--not so much as,
poor dear, she just now tried to be; yet she has done her very best for
you--never forget that!--and has kept me along immeasurably better than
I should have been able to come without her. She has gained me time; and
that, these three months, don't you see? has been everything."

She had said "Don't you see?" on purpose, and was to feel the next
moment that it had acted. "These three months'?" the Prince asked.

"Counting from the night you came home so late from Matcham. Counting
from the hours you spent with Charlotte at Gloucester; your visit to the
cathedral--which you won't have forgotten describing to me in so much
detail. For that was the beginning of my being sure. Before it I had
been sufficiently in doubt. Sure," Maggie developed, "of your having,
and of your having for a long time had, TWO relations with Charlotte."

He stared, a little at sea, as he took it up. "Two--?"

Something in the tone of it gave it a sense, or an ambiguity, almost
foolish--leaving Maggie to feel, as in a flash, how such a consequence,
a foredoomed infelicity, partaking of the ridiculous even in one of the
cleverest, might be of the very essence of the penalty of wrong-doing.
"Oh, you may have had fifty--had the same relation with her fifty times!
It's of the number of KINDS of relation with her that I speak--a number
that doesn't matter, really, so long as there wasn't only one kind, as
father and I supposed. One kind," she went on, "was there before us;
we took that fully for granted, as you saw, and accepted it. We never
thought of there being another, kept out of our sight. But after the
evening I speak of I knew there was something else. As I say, I had,
before that, my idea--which you never dreamed I had. From the moment I
speak of it had more to go upon, and you became yourselves, you and
she, vaguely, yet uneasily, conscious of the difference. But it's within
these last hours that I've most seen where we are; and as I've been in
communication with Fanny Assingham about my doubts, so I wanted to let
her know my certainty--with the determination of which, however, you
must understand, she has had nothing to d