Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/225

THE PRINCESS "That's what I supposed you might mean. Then, darling, what have you—?"

"Asked him for? I've asked him for nothing."

But this in turn made Fanny stare. "Then nothing, that evening of the Embassy dinner, passed between you?"

"On the contrary everything passed."

"Everything—?"

"Everything. I told him what I knew—and I told him how I knew it."

Mrs. Assingham waited. "And that was all?"

"Wasn't it quite enough?"

"Oh love," she bridled, "that's for you to have judged!"

"Then I have judged," said Maggie—"I did judge. I made sure he understood—then I let him alone."

Mrs. Assingham wondered. "But he didn't explain—?"

"Explain? Thank God, no!" Maggie threw back her head as with horror at the thought, then the next moment added: "And I didn't either."

The decency of pride in it shed a cold little light—yet as from heights at the base of which her companion rather panted. "But if he neither denies nor confesses—?"

"He does what's a thousand times better—he lets it alone. He does," Maggie went on, "as he would do; as I see now I was quite sure he would. He lets me alone."

Fanny Assingham turned it over. "Then how do you know so where, as you say, you 'are'?" 215