第183章 Chapter 10(6)

"Downstairs--in the little red room. While he was waiting he looked at the few photographs that stand about there and recognised two of them Though it was so long ago, he remembered the visit made him by the lady and the gentleman, and that gave him his connexion. It gave me mine, for he remembered everything and told me everything. You see you too had produced your effect; only, unlike you he had thought of it again--he HAD recurred to it. He told me of your having wished to make each other presents--but of that's not having come off. The lady was greatly taken with the piece I had bought of him, but you had your reason against receiving it from her, and you had been right. He'd think that of you more than ever now,"

Maggie went on; "he'd see how wisely you had guessed the flaw and how easily the bowl could be broken. I had bought it myself, you see, for a present--he knew I was doing that. This (198) was what had worked in him--especially after the price I had paid."

Her story had dropped an instant; she still brought it out in small waves of energy, each of which spent its force; so that he had an opportunity to speak before this force was renewed. But the quaint thing was what he now said. "And what, pray, WAS the price?"

She paused again a little. "It was high certainly--for those fragments.

I think I feel as I look at them there rather ashamed to say."

The Prince then again looked at them; he might have been growing used to the sight. "But shall you at least get your money back?"

"Oh I'm far from wanting it back--I feel so that I'm getting its worth."

With which, before he could reply, she had a quick transition. "The great fact about the day we're talking of seems to me to have been quite remarkably that no present was then made me. If your undertaking had been for that, that was not at least what came of it."

"You received then nothing at all?" The Prince looked vague and grave, almost retrospectively concerned.

"Nothing but an apology for empty hands and empty pockets; which was made me--as if it mattered a mite!--ever so frankly, ever so beautifully and touchingly."

This Amerigo heard with interest, yet not with confusion. "Ah of course you could n't have minded!" Distinctly, as she went on, he was getting the better of the mere awkwardness of his arrest; quite as if making out that he need SUFFER arrest from her now--(199) before they should go forth to show themselves in the world together--in no greater quantity than an occasion ill-chosen at the best for a scene might decently make room for.

He looked at his watch; their engagement remained all the while before him. "But I don't make out, you see, what case against me you rest--"

"On everything I'm telling you? Why the whole case--the case of your having for so long so successfully deceived me. The idea of your finding something for me--charming as that would have been--was what had least to do with your taking a morning together at that moment. What had really to do with it," said Maggie, "was that you HAD to: you could n't not, from the moment you were again face to face. And the reason of that was that there had been so much between you before--before I came between you at all."

Her husband had been for these last moments moving about under her eyes; but at this, as to check any show of impatience, he again stood still.

"You've never been more sacred to me than you were at that hour--unless perhaps you've become so at this one."

The assurance of his speech, she could note, quite held up its head in him; his eyes met her own so for the declaration that it was as if something cold and momentarily unimaginable breathed upon her, from afar off, out of his strange consistency. She kept her direction still however under that. "Oh the thing I've known best of all is that you've never wanted together to offend us. You've wanted quite intensely not to, and the precautions you've had to take for it have been for a long time one of the strongest of my (200) impressions. That, I think," she added, "is the way I've best known."

"'Known'?" he repeated after a moment.

"Known. Known that you were older friends, and so much more intimate ones, than I had any reason to suppose when we married. Known there were things that had n't been told me--and that gave their meaning little by little to other things that were before me."

"Would they have made a difference in the matter of our marriage," the Prince presently asked, "if you HAD known them?"

She took her time to think. "I grant you not--in the matter of OURS."