t a little shop in Bloomsbury--I
think I could go to the place now. The man understood Italian, I
remember; he wanted awfully to work off his bowl. But I didn't believe
in it, and we didn't take it."

Maggie had listened with an interest that wore all the expression of
candour. "Oh, you left it for me. But what did you take?"

He looked at her; first as if he were trying to remember, then as if he
might have been trying to forget. "Nothing, I think--at that place."

"What did you take then at any other? What did you get me--since that
was your aim and end--for a wedding-gift?"

The Prince continued very nobly to bethink himself. "Didn't we get you
anything?"

Maggie waited a little; she had for some time, now, kept her eyes on him
steadily; but they wandered, at this, to the fragments on her chimney.
"Yes; it comes round, after all, to your having got me the bowl. I
myself was to come upon it, the other day, by so wonderful a chance; was
to find it in the same place and to have it pressed upon me by the same
little man, who does, as you say, understand Italian. I did 'believe in
it,' you see--must have believed in it somehow instinctively; for I took
it as soon as I saw it. Though I didn't know at all then," she added,
"what I was taking WITH it."

The Prince paid her for an instant, visibly, the deference of trying
to imagine what this might have been. "I agree with you that the
coincidence is extraordinary--the sort of thing that happens mainly in
novels and plays. But I don't see, you must let me say, the importance
or the connexion--"

"Of my having made the purchase where you failed of it?" She had quickly
taken him up; but she had, with her eyes on him once more, another drop
into the order of her thoughts, to which, through whatever he might say,
she was still adhering. "It's not my having gone into the place, at the
end of four years, that makes the strangeness of the coincidence; for
don't such chances as that, in London, easily occur? The strangeness,"
she lucidly said, "is in what my purchase was to represent to me after
I had got it home; which value came," she explained, "from the wonder of
my having found such a friend."

"'Such a friend'?" As a wonder, assuredly, her husband could but take
it.

"As the little man in the shop. He did for me more than he knew--I owe
it to him. He took an interest in me," Maggie said; "and, taking that
interest, he recalled your visit, he remembered you and spoke