she was and before she could go further, be hemmed in
and secured. It would have been for a moment, in this case, a matter
of quickly closing the windows and giving the alarm--with poor Maggie's
sense that, though she couldn't know what she wanted of her, it was
enough for trepidation that, at these firm hands, anything should be
to say nothing of the sequel of a flight taken again along the terrace,
even under the shame of the confessed feebleness of such evasions on the
part of an outraged wife. It was to this feebleness, none the less, that
the outraged wife had presently resorted; the most that could be
said for her being, as she felt while she finally stopped short, at a
distance, that she could at any rate resist her abjection sufficiently
not to sneak into the house by another way and safely reach her room.
She had literally caught herself in the act of dodging and ducking, and
it told her there, vividly, in a single word, what she had all along
been most afraid of.

She had been afraid of the particular passage with Charlotte that would
determine her father's wife to take him into her confidence as she
couldn't possibly as yet have done, to prepare for him a statement
of her wrong, to lay before him the infamy of what she was apparently
suspected of. This, should she have made up her mind to do it, would
rest on a calculation the thought of which evoked, strangely, other
possibilities and visions. It would show her as sufficiently believing
in her grasp of her husband to be able to assure herself that, with his
daughter thrown on the defensive, with Maggie's cause and Maggie's word,
in fine, against her own, it wasn't Maggie's that would most certainly
carry the day. Such a glimpse of her conceivable idea, which would be
founded on reasons all her own, reasons of experience and assurance,
impenetrable to others, but intimately familiar to herself--such a
glimpse opened out wide as soon as it had come into view; for if so much
as this was still firm ground between the elder pair, if the beauty of
appearances had been so consistently preserved, it was only the golden
bowl as Maggie herself knew it that had been broken. The breakage stood
not for any wrought discomposure among the triumphant three--it stood
merely for the dire deformity of her attitude toward them. She was
unable at the minute, of course, fully to measure the difference thus
involved for her, and it remained inevitably an agitating image, the
way