ally been doing."

"Oh, I see."

"I needn't torment myself. She has taken them over."

The Colonel declared that he "saw"; yet it was as if, at this, he a
little sightlessly stared. "But what then has happened, from one day to
the other, to HER? What has opened her eyes?"

"They were never really shut. She misses him."

"Then why hasn't she missed him before?"

Well, facing him there, among their domestic glooms and glints, Fanny
worked it out. "She did--but she wouldn't let herself know it. She had
her reason--she wore her blind. Now, at last, her situation has come to
a head. To-day she does know it. And that's illuminating. It has been,"
Mrs. Assingham wound up, "illuminating to ME."

Her husband attended, but the momentary effect of his attention was
vagueness again, and the refuge of his vagueness was a gasp. "Poor dear
little girl!"

"Ah no--don't pity her!"

This did, however, pull him up. "We mayn't even be sorry for her?"

"Not now--or at least not yet. It's too soon--that is if it isn't very
much too late. This will depend," Mrs. Assingham went on; "at any rate
we shall see. We might have pitied her before--for all the good it would
then have done her; we might have begun some time ago. Now, however, she
has begun to live. And the way it comes to me, the way it comes to me--"
But again she projected her vision.

"The way it comes to you can scarcely be that she'll like it!"

"The way it comes to me is that she will live. The way it comes to me is
that she'll triumph."

She said this with so sudden a prophetic flare that it fairly cheered
her husband. "Ah then, we must back her!"

"No--we mustn't touch her. We mayn't touch any of them. We must keep
our hands off; we must go on tiptoe. We must simply watch and wait.
And meanwhile," said Mrs. Assingham, "we must bear it as we can. That's
where we are--and serves us right. We're in presence."

And so, moving about the room as in communion with shadowy portents, she
left it till he questioned again. "In presence of what?"

"Well, of something possibly beautiful. Beautiful as it MAY come off."

She had paused there before him while he wondered. "You mean she'll get
the Prince back?"

She raised her hand in quick impatience: the suggestion might have been
almost abject. "It isn't a question of recovery. It won't be a question
of any vulgar struggle. To 'get him back' she must have lost him, and to
have lost him she must have had him." With which