."

Mrs. Assingham, still darkly contemplative, denied this with a
headshake. "She won't 'put' it anywhere. She won't do with it anything
anyone else would. She'll take it all herself."

"You mean she'll make it out her own fault?"

"Yes--she'll find means, somehow, to arrive at that."

"Ah then," the Colonel dutifully declared, "she's indeed a little
brick!"

"Oh," his wife returned, "you'll see, in one way or another, to what
tune!" And she spoke, of a sudden, with an approach to elation--so that,
as if immediately feeling his surprise, she turned round to him. "She'll
see me somehow through!"

"See YOU--?"

"Yes, me. I'm the worst. For," said Fanny Assingham, now with a harder
exaltation, "I did it all. I recognise that--I accept it. She won't
cast it up at me--she won't cast up anything. So I throw myself upon
her--she'll bear me up." She spoke almost volubly--she held him with her
sudden sharpness. "She'll carry the whole weight of us."

There was still, nevertheless, wonder in it. "You mean she won't mind? I
SAY, love--!" And he not unkindly stared. "Then where's the difficulty?"

"There isn't any!" Fanny declared with the same rich emphasis. It kept
him indeed, as by the loss of the thread, looking at her longer. "Ah,
you mean there isn't any for US!"

She met his look for a minute as if it perhaps a little too much imputed
a selfishness, a concern, at any cost, for their own surface. Then she
might have been deciding that their own surface was, after all, what
they had most to consider. "Not," she said with dignity, "if we properly
keep our heads." She appeared even to signify that they would begin by
keeping them now. This was what it was to have at last a constituted
basis. "Do you remember what you said to me that night of my first REAL
anxiety--after the Foreign Office party?"

"In the carriage--as we came home?" Yes--he could recall it. "Leave them
to pull through?"

"Precisely. 'Trust their own wit,' you practically said, 'to save all
appearances.' Well, I've trusted it. I HAVE left them to pull through."

He hesitated. "And your point is that they're not doing so?"

"I've left them," she went on, "but now I see how and where. I've been
leaving them all the while, without knowing it, to HER."

"To the Princess?"

"And that's what I mean," Mrs. Assingham pensively pursued. "That's what
happened to me with her to-day," she continued to explain. "It came home
to me that that's what I've re