Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/397

THE PRINCE "No—I've never till now guaranteed anything but my own disposition to worry. I've never till now," Fanny went on gravely from her chair, "had such a chance to see and to judge. I had it at that place—if I had, in my infatuation and my folly," she added with expression, "nothing else. So I did see—I have seen. And now I know." Her emphasis, as she repeated the word, made her head, in her seat of infallibility, rise higher. "I know."

The Colonel took it—but took it at first in silence. "Do you mean they've told you—?"

"No—I mean nothing so absurd. For in the first place I haven't asked them, and in the second their word in such a matter wouldn't count."

"Oh," said the Colonel with all his oddity, "they'd tell us."

It made her face him an instant as with her old impatience of his short cuts, always across her finest flower-beds; but she felt none the less that she kept her irony down. "Then when they've told you, you'll be perhaps so good as to let me know."

He jerked up his chin, testing the growth of his beard with the back of his hand while he fixed her with a single eye. "Ah I don't say that they'd necessarily tell me that they are over the traces."

"They'll necessarily, whatever happens, hold their tongues, I hope, and I'm talking of them now as I take them for myself only. That's enough for me—it's all I have to regard." With which, after an instant, "They're wonderful," said Fanny Assingham.

"Indeed," her husband concurred, "I really think they are." 367