Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/143

THE PRINCESS morning to night at this crisis but talk? "Who'll keep the others?"

"The others—?"

"Who'll keep them quiet? If your couple have had a life together they can't have had it completely without witnesses, without the help of persons, however few, who must have some knowledge, some idea about them. They've had to meet, secretly, protectedly, they've had to arrange; for if they haven't met and haven't arranged and haven't thereby in some quarter or other had to give themselves away, why are we piling it up so? Therefore if there's evidence up and down London—"

"There must be people in possession of it? Ah it isn't all," she always remembered, "up and down London. Some of it must connect them—I mean," she musingly added, "it naturally would—with other places; with who knows what strange adventures, opportunities, dissimulations? But whatever there may have been it will also all have been buried on the spot. Oh they've known how—too beautifully! But nothing all the same is likely to find its way to Maggie of itself."

"Because every one who may have anything to tell, you hold, will have been so squared?" And then inveterately, before she could say—he enjoyed so much coming to this: "What will have squared Lady Castledean?"

"The consciousness"—she had never lost her promptness—"of having no stones to throw at any one else's windows. She has enough to do to guard her own glass. That was what she was doing," Fanny 133