It was finding there in fact everything and everyone but the Prince, who mostly, just now, kept away, or who, at all events, on the interspaced occasions of his calling, happened not to encounter the only person from whom he was a little estranged.

It would have been all prodigious if he had not already, with Charlotte's aid, so very considerably lived into it--it would have been all indescribably remarkable, this fact that, with wonderful causes for it so operating on the surface, nobody else, as yet, in the combination, seemed estranged from anybody.

If Mrs.Assingham delighted in Maggie she knew by this time how most easily to reach her, and if she was unhappy about Charlotte she knew, by the same reasoning, how most probably to miss that vision of her on which affliction would feed.

It might feed of course on finding her so absent from her home--just as this particular phenomenon of her domestic detachment could be, by the anxious mind, best studied there.

Fanny was, however, for her reasons, "shy" of Portland Place itself--this was appreciable; so that she might well, after all, have no great light on the question of whether Charlotte's appearances there were frequent or not, any more than on that of the account they might be keeping of the usual solitude (since it came to this) of the head of that house.