her to build up her falsehood--to which, accordingly,
she contributed another block. "I've affected you evidently--quite
accidentally--in some way of which I've been all unaware. I've NOT felt
at any time that you've wronged me."

"How could I come within a mile," Charlotte inquired, "of such a
possibility?"

Maggie, with her eyes on her more easily now, made no attempt to say;
she said, after a little, something more to the present point. "I accuse
you--I accuse you of nothing."

"Ah, that's lucky!"

Charlotte had brought this out with the richness, almost, of gaiety; and
Maggie, to go on, had to think, with her own intensity, of Amerigo--to
think how he, on his side, had had to go through with his lie to her,
how it was for his wife he had done so, and how his doing so had
given her the clue and set her the example. He must have had his own
difficulty about it, and she was not, after all, falling below him. It
was in fact as if, thanks to her hovering image of him confronted with
this admirable creature even as she was confronted, there glowed upon
her from afar, yet straight and strong, a deep explanatory light which
covered the last inch of the ground. He had given her something to
conform to, and she hadn't unintelligently turned on him, "gone back on"
him, as he would have said, by not conforming. They were together thus,
he and she, close, close together--whereas Charlotte, though rising
there radiantly before her, was really off in some darkness of space
that would steep her in solitude and harass her with care. The heart of
the Princess swelled, accordingly, even in her abasement; she had kept
in tune with the right, and something, certainly, something that might
be like a rare flower snatched from an impossible ledge, would, and
possibly soon, come of it for her. The right, the right--yes, it took
this extraordinary form of her humbugging, as she had called it, to the
end. It was only a question of not, by a hair's breadth, deflecting into
the truth. So, supremely, was she braced. "You must take it from me that
your anxiety rests quite on a misconception. You must take it from
me that I've never at any moment fancied I could suffer by you." And,
marvellously, she kept it up--not only kept it up, but improved on
it. "You must take it from me that I've never thought of you but as
beautiful, wonderful and good. Which is all, I think, that you can
possibly ask."

Charlotte held her a moment longer: she need