Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/173

THE PRINCESS terms on which she was let off—her quantity of release having made its sufficient show in that recall of her relation to Charlotte's old reappearance; and deep within the whole impression glowed—ah so inspiringly when it came to that!—her steady view, clear from the first, of the beauty of her companion's motive. It was like a fresh sacrifice for a larger conquest—"Only see me through now, do it in the face of this and in spite of it, and I leave you a hand of which the freedom isn't to be said!" The aggravation of fear—or call it apparently of knowledge—had jumped straight into its place as an aggravation above all for her father; the effect of this being but to quicken to passion her reasons for making his protectedness, or in other words the forms of his ignorance, still the law of her attitude and the key to her solution. She kept as tight hold of these reasons and these forms, in her confirmed horror, as the rider of a plunging horse grasps his seat with his knees and she might absolutely have been putting it to her guest that she believed she could stay on if they should only "meet" nothing more. Though ignorant still of what she had definitely met Fanny yearned, within, over her spirit; and so, no word about it said, passed, through mere pitying eyes, a vow to walk ahead and, at cross-roads, with a lantern for the darkness and wavings-away for unadvised traffic, look out for alarms. There was accordingly no wait in Maggie's reply. "They spent together hours—spent at least a morning—the certainty of which has come back to me now, but that I didn't dream of at the time. That cup there has turned witness— 163