Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/212

THE GOLDEN BOWL "That you've ceased—?" With her pause in fact she had fairly made him press her for it.

"Why to be as I was. Not to know."

It was once more then after a little that he had had to stand receptive; yet the singular effect of this was that there was still something of the same sort he was made to want. He had another hesitation, but at last this odd quantity showed. "Then does any one else know?"

It was as near as he could come to naming her father, and she kept him at that distance. "Any one—?"

"Any one I mean but Fanny Assingham."

"I should have supposed you had had by this time particular means of learning. I don't see," she said, "why you ask me."

Then after an instant—and only after an instant as she saw—he made out what she meant; and it gave her all strangely enough the still further light that Charlotte, for herself, knew as little as he had known. The vision loomed in this light, it fairly glared for the few seconds—the vision of the two others alone together at Fawns, and Charlotte, as one of them, having gropingly to go on, always not knowing and not knowing! The picture flushed at the same time with all its essential colour—that of the so possible identity of her father's motive and principle with her own. He was "deep," as Amerigo called it, so that no vibration of the still air should reach his daughter; just as she had earned that description by making and by, for that matter, intending still to make, her care for his serenity, or at any rate for the firm outer shell of 202