on
fair, fresh gloves; while she interrupted the process first to give
his necktie a slightly smarter twist and then to make up to him for
her hidden madness by rubbing her nose into his cheek according to the
tradition of their frankest levity.

From the instant she should be able to convict him of intending, every
issue would be closed and her hypocrisy would have to redouble. The
only way to sacrifice him would be to do so without his dreaming what
it might be for. She kissed him, she arranged his cravat, she dropped
remarks, she guided him out, she held his arm, not to be led, but to
lead him, and taking it to her by much the same intimate pressure she
had always used, when a little girl, to mark the inseparability of her
doll--she did all these things so that he should sufficiently fail to
dream of what they might be for.

XXIX

There was nothing to show that her effort in any degree fell short till
they got well into the Park and he struck her as giving, unexpectedly,
the go-by to any serious search for the Principino. The way they sat
down awhile in the sun was a sign of that; his dropping with her into
the first pair of sequestered chairs they came across and waiting a
little, after they were placed, as if now at last she might bring out,
as between them, something more specific. It made her but feel the more
sharply how the specific, in almost any direction, was utterly forbidden
her--how the use of it would be, for all the world, like undoing the
leash of a dog eager to follow up a scent. It would come out, the
specific, where the dog would come out; would run to earth, somehow, the
truth--for she was believing herself in relation to the truth!--at which
she mustn't so much as indirectly point. Such, at any rate, was the
fashion in which her passionate prudence played over possibilities of
danger, reading symptoms and betrayals into everything she looked at,
and yet having to make it evident, while she recognised them, that she
didn't wince. There were moments between them, in their chairs, when
he might have been watching her guard herself and trying to think of
something new that would trip her up. There were pauses during which,
with her affection as sweet and still as the sunshine, she might yet,
as at some hard game, over a table, for money, have been defying him to
fasten upon her the least little complication of consciousness. She was
positively proud, afterwards, of th