thing else."

"Nothing can ever make you think anything you don't want to," the
Colonel, still in his chair, remarked over his pipe. "You've got a
precious power of thinking whatever you do want. You want also, from
moment to moment, to think such desperately different things. What
happened," he went on, "was that you fell violently in love with the
Prince yourself, and that as you couldn't get me out of the way you had
to take some roundabout course. You couldn't marry him, any more than
Charlotte could--that is not to yourself. But you could to somebody
else--it was always the Prince, it was always marriage. You could to
your little friend, to whom there were no objections."

"Not only there were no objections, but there were reasons, positive
ones--and all excellent, all charming." She spoke with an absence of
all repudiation of his exposure of the spring of her conduct; and
this abstention, clearly and effectively conscious, evidently cost
her nothing. "It IS always the Prince; and it IS always, thank heaven,
marriage. And these are the things, God grant, that it will always be.
That I could help, a year ago, most assuredly made me happy, and it
continues to make me happy."

"Then why aren't you quiet?"

"I AM quiet," said Fanny Assingham.

He looked at her, with his colourless candour, still in his place; she
moved about again, a little, emphasising by her unrest her declaration
of her tranquillity. He was as silent, at first, as if he had taken her
answer, but he was not to keep it long. "What do you make of it that, by
your own show, Charlotte couldn't tell her all? What do you make of it
that the Prince didn't tell her anything? Say one understands that there
are things she can't be told--since, as you put it, she is so easily
scared and shocked." He produced these objections slowly, giving her
time, by his pauses, to stop roaming and come back to him. But she
was roaming still when he concluded his inquiry. "If there hadn't been
anything there shouldn't have been between the pair before Charlotte
bolted--in order, precisely, as you say, that there SHOULDN'T be: why in
the world was what there HAD been too bad to be spoken of?"

Mrs. Assingham, after this question, continued still to circulate--not
directly meeting it even when at last she stopped.

"I thought you wanted me to be quiet."

"So I do--and I'm trying to make you so much so that you won't worry
more. Can't you be quiet on THAT?"

She thoug