Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/209

THE PRINCESS they should go forth to show themselves in the world together—in no greater quantity than an occasion ill-chosen at the best for a scene might decently make room for. He looked at his watch; their engagement remained all the while before him. "But I don't make out, you see, what case against me you rest—"

"On everything I'm telling you? Why the whole case—the case of your having for so long so successfully deceived me. The idea of your finding something for me—charming as that would have been—was what had least to do with your taking a morning together at that moment. What had really to do with it," said Maggie, "was that you had to: you couldn't not, from the moment you were again face to face. And the reason of that was that there had been so much between you before—before I came between you at all."

Her husband had been for these last moments moving about under her eyes; but at this, as to check any show of impatience, he again stood still. "You've never been more sacred to me than you were at that hour—unless perhaps you've become so at this one."

The assurance of his speech, she could note, quite held up its head in him; his eyes met her own so for the declaration that it was as if something cold and momentarily unimaginable breathed upon her, from afar off, out of his strange consistency. She kept her direction still however under that. "Oh the thing I've known best of all is that you've never wanted together to offend us. You've wanted quite intensely not to, and the precautions you've had to take for it have been for a long time one of the strongest of my 199