That was a mere shock, that was a pain--as if Fanny's violence had been a violence redoubled and acting beyond its intention, a violence calling up the hot blood as a blow across the mouth might have called it.

Maggie knew as she turned away from him that she didn't want his pain; what she wanted was her own simple certainty--not the red mark of conviction flaming there in his beauty.

If she could have gone on with bandaged eyes she would have liked that best; if it were a question of saying what she now, apparently, should have to, and of taking from him what he would say, any blindness that might wrap it would be the nearest approach to a boon.
She went in silence to where her friend--never, in intention, visibly, so much her friend as at that moment--had braced herself to so amazing an energy, and there, under Amerigo's eyes, she picked up the shining pieces.

Bedizened and jewelled, in her rustling finery, she paid, with humility of attitude, this prompt tribute to order--only to find, however, that she could carry but two of the fragments at once.

She brought them over to the chimney-piece, to the conspicuous place occupied by the cup before Fanny's appropriation of it, and, after laying them carefully down, went back for what remained, the solid detached foot.