tages, which she could stand
there and trace. The dread, after a minute, had dropped from her face;
though, discernibly enough, she still couldn't believe in her having, in
so strange a fashion, been deliberately made up to. If she had been made
up to, at least, it was with an idea--the idea that had struck her at
first as necessarily dangerous. That it wasn't, insistently wasn't, this
shone from Maggie with a force finally not to be resisted; and on that
perception, on the immense relief so constituted, everything had by the
end of three minutes extraordinarily changed. Maggie had come out to
her, really, because she knew her doomed, doomed to a separation
that was like a knife in her heart; and in the very sight of her
uncontrollable, her blinded physical quest of a peace not to be grasped,
something of Mrs. Assingham's picture of her as thrown, for a grim
future, beyond the great sea and the great continent had at first found
fulfilment. She had got away, in this fashion--burning behind her,
almost, the ships of disguise--to let her horror of what was before
her play up without witnesses; and even after Maggie's approach had
presented an innocent front it was still not to be mistaken that she
bristled with the signs of her extremity. It was not to be said for
them, either, that they were draped at this hour in any of her usual
graces; unveiled and all but unashamed, they were tragic to the Princess
in spite of the dissimulation that, with the return of comparative
confidence, was so promptly to operate. How tragic, in essence, the very
change made vivid, the instant stiffening of the spring of pride--this
for possible defence if not for possible aggression. Pride indeed,
the next moment, had become the mantle caught up for protection and
perversity; she flung it round her as a denial of any loss of her
freedom. To be doomed was, in her situation, to have extravagantly
incurred a doom, so that to confess to wretchedness was, by the same
stroke, to confess to falsity. She wouldn't confess, she didn't--a
thousand times no; she only cast about her, and quite frankly and
fiercely, for something else that would give colour to her having burst
her bonds. Her eyes expanded, her bosom heaved as she invoked it, and
the effect upon Maggie was verily to wish she could only help her to it.
She presently got up--which seemed to mean "Oh, stay if you like!" and
when she had moved about awhile at random, looking away, looking at
anyt