THE GOLDEN BOWL
—the proof. They were together all the while—up to the very eve of our marriage. Don't you remember how just before that she came back so unexpectedly from America?"
The question had for Mrs. Assingham—and whether all consciously or not—the oddest pathos of simplicity. "Oh yes, dear, of course I remember how she came back from America—and how she stayed with us, and what view one had of it."
Maggie's eyes still all the time pressed and penetrated; so that during a moment just here she might have given the little flare, have made the little pounce, of asking what then "one's" view had been. To the small flash of this eruption Fanny stood for her minute wittingly exposed; but she saw it as quickly cease to threaten—quite saw the Princess, even though in all her pain, refuse, in the interest of their strange and exalted bargain, to take advantage of the opportunity for planting the stab of reproach, the opportunity thus coming all of itself. She saw her—or believed she saw her—look at her chance for straight denunciation, look at it and then pass it by; and she felt herself with this fact hushed well-nigh to awe at the lucid higher intention that no distress could confound and that no discovery—since it was, however obscurely, a case of "discovery"—could make less needful. These seconds were brief—they rapidly passed; but they lasted long enough to renew our friend's sense of her own extraordinary undertaking, the function again imposed on her, the answerability again drilled into her, by this intensity of intimation. She was reminded of the
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