Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/204

THE GOLDEN BOWL giving you, and yet possible from other points of view as well, in which it seemed I could be of use. You were naturally not to be told—precisely because it was all for you. We went forth together and we looked; we rummaged about and, as I remember we called it, we prowled; then it was that, as I freely recognise, we came across that crystal cup—which I'm bound to say, upon my honour, I think it rather a pity Fanny Assingham, from whatever good motive, should have treated so ill." He had kept his hands in his pockets; he turned his eyes again, but more complacently now, to the ruins of the precious vessel; and Maggie could feel him exhale into the achieved quietness of his explanation a long deep breath of comparative relief. Behind everything, beneath everything it was somehow a comfort to him at last to be talking with her—and he seemed to be proving to himself that he could talk. "It was at a little shop in Bloomsbury—I think I could go to the place now. The man understood Italian, I remember; he wanted awfully to work off his bowl. But I didn't believe in it and we didn't take it."

Maggie had listened with an interest that wore all the expression of candour. "Oh you left it for me. But what did you take?"

He looked at her; first as if he were trying to remember, then as if he might have been trying to forget. "Nothing, I think—at that place."

"What did you take then at any other? What did you get me—since that was your aim and end—for a wedding-gift?"

"Didn't we get you anything?" The Prince had 194