again face to face. And the reason of
that was that there had been so much between you before--before I came
between you at all."

Her husband had been for these last moments moving about under her eyes;
but at this, as to check any show of impatience, he again stood still.
"You've never been more sacred to me than you were at that hour--unless
perhaps you've become so at this one."

The assurance of his speech, she could note, quite held up its head in
him; his eyes met her own so, for the declaration, that it was as if
something cold and momentarily unimaginable breathed upon her, from
afar off, out of his strange consistency. She kept her direction still,
however, under that. "Oh, the thing I've known best of all is that
you've never wanted, together, to offend us. You've wanted quite
intensely not to, and the precautions you've had to take for it have
been for a long time one of the strongest of my impressions. That, I
think," she added, "is the way I've best known."

"Known?" he repeated after a moment.

"Known. Known that you were older friends, and so much more intimate
ones, than I had any reason to suppose when we married. Known there were
things that hadn't been told me--and that gave their meaning, little by
little, to other things that were before me."

"Would they have made a difference, in the matter of our marriage," the
Prince presently asked, "if you HAD known them?"

She took her time to think. "I grant you not--in the matter of OURS."
And then as he again fixed her with his hard yearning, which he couldn't
keep down: "The question is so much bigger than that. You see how
much what I know makes of it for me." That was what acted on him, this
iteration of her knowledge, into the question of the validity, of the
various bearings of which, he couldn't on the spot trust himself
to pretend, in any high way, to go. What her claim, as she made it,
represented for him--that he couldn't help betraying, if only as a
consequence of the effect of the word itself, her repeated distinct
"know, know," on his nerves. She was capable of being sorry for his
nerves at a time when he should need them for dining out, pompously,
rather responsibly, without his heart in it; yet she was not to let that
prevent her using, with all economy, so precious a chance for supreme
clearness. "I didn't force this upon you, you must recollect, and it
probably wouldn't have happened for you if you hadn't come in."

"Ah," said the