ossible
relation to the whole fact which alone would bear upon her irresistibly.
It was extraordinary: they positively brought home to her that to feel
about them in any of the immediate, inevitable, assuaging ways, the ways
usually open to innocence outraged and generosity betrayed, would have
been to give them up, and that giving them up was, marvellously, not
to be thought of. She had never, from the first hour of her state of
acquired conviction, given them up so little as now; though she was, no
doubt, as the consequence of a step taken a few minutes later, to invoke
the conception of doing that, if might be, even less. She had resumed
her walk--stopping here and there, while she rested on the cool smooth
stone balustrade, to draw it out; in the course of which, after a
little, she passed again the lights of the empty drawing-room and paused
again for what she saw and felt there.

It was not at once, however, that this became quite concrete; that was
the effect of her presently making out that Charlotte was in the room,
launched and erect there, in the middle, and looking about her; that she
had evidently just come round to it, from her card-table, by one of
the passages--with the expectation, to all appearance, of joining her
stepdaughter. She had pulled up at seeing the great room empty--Maggie
not having passed out, on leaving the group, in a manner to be observed.
So definite a quest of her, with the bridge-party interrupted or altered
for it, was an impression that fairly assailed the Princess, and to
which something of attitude and aspect, of the air of arrested pursuit
and purpose, in Charlotte, together with the suggestion of her next
vague movements, quickly added its meaning. This meaning was that she
had decided, that she had been infinitely conscious of Maggie's presence
before, that she knew that she would at last find her alone, and that
she wanted her, for some reason, enough to have presumably called on
Bob Assingham for aid. He had taken her chair and let her go, and the
arrangement was for Maggie a signal proof of her earnestness; of the
energy, in fact, that, though superficially commonplace in a situation
in which people weren't supposed to be watching each other, was what
affected our young woman, on the spot, as a breaking of bars. The
splendid shining supple creature was out of the cage, was at large; and
the question now almost grotesquely rose of whether she mightn't by some
art, just where