He would have drawn from this, say, his artless inference--taken it for a sign of some smothered inward trouble and pointed, naturally, the moral that the way out of such straits was not through neglect of the grand remedy.

He had possibly prescribed contrition--he had at any rate quickened in her the beat of that false repose to which our young woman's own act had devoted her at her all so deluded instance.

The falsity of it had laid traps compared to which the imputation of treachery even accepted might have seemed a path of roses.
The acceptance, strangely, would have left her nothing to do--she could have remained, had she liked, all insolently passive; whereas the failure to proceed against her, as it might have been called, left her everything, and all the more that it was wrapped so in confidence.
She had to confirm, day after day, the rightness of her cause and the justice and felicity of her exemption--so that wouldn't there have been, fairly, in any explicit concern of Father Mitchell's, depths of practical derision of her success?
The question was provisionally answered, at all events, by the time the party at luncheon had begun to disperse--with Maggie's version of Mrs.
Verver sharp to the point of representing her pretext for absence as a positive flight from derision.

She met the good priest's eyes before they separated, and priests were really, at the worst, so to speak, such wonderful people that she believed him for an instant on the verge of saying to her, in abysmal softness: "Go to Mrs.Verver, my child--YOU go: you'll find that you can help her." This didn't come, however; nothing came but the renewed twiddle of thumbs over the satisfied stomach and the full flush, the comical candour, of reference to the hand employed at Fawns for mayonnaise of salmon.

Nothing came but the receding backs of each of the others--her father's slightly bent shoulders, in especial, which seemed to weave his spell, by the force of habit, not less patiently than if his wife had been present.