as all profusely present; so that perhaps at no moment yet had she been so justified of her faith as at the particular instant of our being again concerned with her, that of her chancing to glance higher up from where she stood and meeting in consequence the quiet eyes of Colonel Assingham, who had his elbows on the broad balustrade of the great gallery overhanging the staircase and who immediately exchanged with her one of his most artlessly familiar signals.  This simplicity of his visual attention struck her, even with the other things she had to think about, as the quietest note in the whole high pitch—­much, in fact, as if she had pressed a finger on a chord or a key and created, for the number of seconds, an arrest of vibration, a more muffled thump.  The sight of him suggested indeed that Fanny would be there, though so far as opportunity went she had not seen her.  This was about the limit of what it could suggest.

The air, however, had suggestions enough—­it abounded in them, many of them precisely helping to constitute those conditions with which, for our young woman, the hour was brilliantly crowned.  She was herself in truth crowned, and it all hung together, melted together, in light and colour and sound:  the unsurpassed diamonds that her head so happily carried, the other jewels, the other perfections of aspect and arrangement that made her personal scheme a success, the proved private theory that materials to work with had been all she required and that there were none too precious for her to understand and use—­to which might be added lastly, as the strong-scented flower of the total sweetness, an easy command, a high enjoyment, of her crisis.  For a crisis she was ready to take it, and this ease it was, doubtless, that helped her, while she waited, to the right assurance, to the right indifference, to the right expression, and above all, as she felt, to the right view of her opportunity for happiness—­unless indeed the opportunity itself, rather, were, in its mere strange amplitude, the producing, the precipitating cause.  The ordered revellers, rustling and shining, with sweep of train and glitter of star and clink of sword, and yet, for all this, but so imperfectly articulate, so vaguely vocal—­the double stream of the coming and the going, flowing together where she stood, passed her, brushed her, treated her to much crude contemplation and now and then to a spasm of speech, an offered hand, even in some cases to an unencouraged pause; but she missed no countenance and invited no protection:  she fairly liked to be, so long as she might, just as she was—­exposed a little to the public, no doubt, in her unaccompanied state, but, even if it were a bit brazen, careless of queer reflections on the dull polish of London faces, and exposed, since it was a question of exposure, to much more competent recognitions of her own.  She hoped no one would stop—­she was positively keeping herself; it was her idea to mark in a particular manner the importance of something that had just happened.  She knew how she should mark it, and what she was doing there made already a beginning.