Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/176

THE GOLDEN BOWL and to look at each other with faces that pretend for the ghastly hour not to be seeing it?"

Maggie looked at her with a face that might have been the one she was preparing. "'Unexplained,' my dear? Quite the contrary—explained: fully, intensely, admirably explained, with nothing really to add. My own love"—she kept it up—"I don't want anything more. I've plenty to go upon and to do with as it is."

Fanny Assingham stood there in her comparative darkness, with her links verily still missing; and the most acceptable effect of this was, singularly, as yet, a cold fear of getting nearer the fact. "But when you come home—? I mean he'll come up with you again. Won't he see it then?"

On which Maggie gave her, after an instant's visible thought, the strangest of slow headshakes. "I don't know. Perhaps he'll never see it—if it only stands there waiting for him. He may never again," said the Princess, "come into this room."

Fanny more deeply wondered. "Never again? Oh—!"

"Yes, it may be. How do I know? With this!" she quietly went on.

She hadn't looked again at the incriminating piece, but there was a marvel to her friend in the way the little word representing it seemed to express and include for her the whole of her situation. "Then you intend not to speak to him—?"

Maggie waited. "To 'speak'—?"

"Well, about your having it and about what you consider that it represents." 166