Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/407

THE PRINCE And she bore down with her decision the superficial lack of sequence. "They may very possibly, for a demonstration—as I see them—not have come back."

He could but wonder, at this, how she did see them. "May have bolted somewhere together?"

"May have stayed over at Matcham itself till tomorrow. May have wired home, each of them, since Maggie left me. May have done," Fanny Assingham continued, "God knows what!" She went on suddenly with more emotion—which, at the pressure of some spring of her inner vision, broke out in a wail of distress imperfectly smothered. "Whatever they've done I shall never know. Never, never—because I don't want to and because nothing will induce me. So they may do as they like. But I've worked for them all!" She uttered this last with another irrepressible quaver, and the next moment her tears had come, though she had, with the explosion, quitted her husband as if to hide it from him. She passed into the dusky drawing-room where during his own prowl shortly previous he had drawn up a blind, so that the light of the street-lamps came in a little at the window. She made for this window, against which she leaned her head, while the Colonel, with his lengthened face, looked after her for a minute and hesitated. He might have been trying to guess what she had really done, to what extent, beyond his knowledge or his conception, in the affairs of these people, she could have committed herself. But to hear her cry and yet do her best not to was quickly enough too much for him; he had known her 377