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 ast really coming. They were coming--that is Maggie was--largely to see her, and above all to be with her THERE. It was all altered--by Charlotte's going to Florence. She went from one day to the other--you forget everything. She gave her reasons, but I thought it odd, at the time; I had a sense that something must have happened. The difficulty was that, though I knew a little, I didn't know enough. I didn't know her relation with him had been, as you say, a 'near' thing--that is I didn't know HOW near. The poor girl's departure was a flight--she went to save herself."

He had listened more than he showed--as came out in his tone. "To save herself?"

"Well, also, really, I think, to save HIM too. I saw it afterwards--I see it all now. He would have been sorry--he didn't want to hurt her."

"Oh, I daresay," the Colonel laughed. "They generally don't!"

"At all events," his wife pursued, "she escaped--they both did; for they had had simply to face it. Their marriage couldn't be, and, if that was so, the sooner they put the Apennines between them the better. It had taken them, it is true, some time to feel this and to find it out. They had met constantly, and not always publicly, all that winter; they had met more than was known-- though it was a good deal known. More, certainly," she said, "than I then imagined--though I don't know what difference it would after all have made with me. I liked him, I thought him charming, from the first of our knowing him; and now, after more than a year, he has done nothing to spoil it. And there are things he might have done--things that many men easily would. Therefore I believe in him, and I was right, at first, in knowing I was going to. So I haven't"--and she stated it as she might have quoted from a slate, after adding up the items, the sum of a column of figures--"so I haven't, I say to myself, been a fool."

"Well, are you trying to make out that I've said you have? All their case wants, at any rate," Bob Assingham declared, "is that you should leave it well alone. It's theirs now; they've bought it, over the counter, and paid for it. It has ceased to be yours."