marked. "What did they do for
themselves, all the same, from the moment they got that free hand to the
moment (long after dinner-time, haven't you told me?) of their turning
up at their respective homes?"

"Well, it's none of your business!"

"I don't speak of it as mine, but it's only too much theirs. People are
always traceable, in England, when tracings are required. Something,
sooner or later, happens; somebody, sooner or later, breaks the holy
calm. Murder will out."

"Murder will--but this isn't murder. Quite the contrary perhaps! I
verily believe," she had her moments of adding, "that, for the amusement
of the row, you would prefer an explosion."

This, however, was a remark he seldom noticed; he wound up, for the most
part, after a long, contemplative smoke, with a transition from which no
exposed futility in it had succeeded in weaning him. "What I can't for
my life make out is your idea of the old boy."

"Charlotte's too inconceivably funny husband? I HAVE no idea."

"I beg your pardon--you've just shown it. You never speak of him but as
too inconceivably funny."

"Well, he is," she always confessed. "That is he may be, for all I know,
too inconceivably great. But that's not an idea. It represents only
my weak necessity of feeling that he's beyond me--which isn't an idea
either. You see he MAY be stupid too."

"Precisely--there you are."

"Yet on the other hand," she always went on, "he MAY be sublime:
sublimer even than Maggie herself. He may in fact have already been. But
we shall never know." With which her tone betrayed perhaps a shade of
soreness for the single exemption she didn't yearningly welcome. "THAT I
can see."

"Oh, I say--!" It came to affect the Colonel himself with a sense of
privation.

"I'm not sure, even, that Charlotte will."

"Oh, my dear, what Charlotte doesn't know--!"

But she brooded and brooded. "I'm not sure even that the Prince will."
It seemed privation, in short, for them all. "They'll be mystified,
confounded, tormented. But they won't know--and all their possible
putting their heads together won't make them. That," said Fanny
Assingham, "will be their punishment." And she ended, ever, when she
had come so far, at the same pitch. "It will probably also--if I get off
with so little--be mine."

"And what," her husband liked to ask, "will be mine?"

"Nothing--you're not worthy of any. One's punishment is in what one
feels, and what will make ours effective is th