For Maggie too, at a stroke, almost beneficently, their visitor had, from being an inconvenience, become a sign.

They had made vacant, by their marriage, his immediate foreground, his personal precinct--they being the Princess and the Prince.

They had made room in it for others--so others had become aware.

He became aware himself, for that matter, during the minute Maggie stood there before speaking; and with the sense, moreover, of what he saw her see, he had the sense of what she saw HIM.

This last, it may be added, would have been his intensest perception had there not, the next instant, been more for him in Fanny Assingham.