at the late hour and
in the still house, have been a pair of specious worldly adventurers,
driven for relief, under sudden stress, to some grim midnight reckoning
in an odd corner. Her attention moved mechanically over the objects of
ornament disposed too freely on the walls of staircase and landing,
as to which recognition, for the time, had lost both fondness and
compunction. "I can imagine the way it works," she said; "it's so easy
to understand. Yet I don't want to be wrong," she the next moment broke
out "I don't, I don't want to be wrong!"

"To make a mistake, you mean?"

Oh no, she meant nothing of the sort; she knew but too well what she
meant. "I don't make mistakes. But I perpetrate--in thought--crimes."
And she spoke with all intensity. "I'm a most dreadful person. There are
times when I seem not to mind a bit what I've done, or what I think or
imagine or fear or accept; when I feel that I'd do it again--feel that
I'd do things myself."

"Ah, my dear!" the Colonel remarked in the coolness of debate.

"Yes, if you had driven me back on my 'nature.' Luckily for you you
never have. You've done every thing else, but you've never done that.
But what I really don't a bit want," she declared, "is to abet them or
to protect them."

Her companion turned this over. "What is there to protect them
from?--if, by your now so settled faith, they've done nothing that
justly exposes them."

And it in fact half pulled her up. "Well, from a sudden scare. From the
alarm, I mean, of what Maggie MAY think."

"Yet if your whole idea is that Maggie thinks nothing--?"

She waited again. "It isn't my 'whole' idea. Nothing is my 'whole'
idea--for I felt to-day, as I tell you, that there's so much in the
air."

"Oh, in the air--!" the Colonel dryly breathed.

"Well, what's in the air always HAS--hasn't it?--to come down to the
earth. And Maggie," Mrs. Assingham continued, "is a very curious little
person. Since I was 'in,' this afternoon, for seeing more than I had
ever done--well, I felt THAT too, for some reason, as I hadn't yet felt
it."

"For 'some' reason? For what reason?" And then, as his wife at first
said nothing: "Did she give any sign? Was she in any way different?"

"She's always so different from anyone else in the world that it's hard
to say when she's different from herself. But she has made me," said
Fanny after an instant, "think of her differently. She drove me home."

"Home here?"

"First to Portla