Prince, "I was liable to come in, you know."

"I didn't think you were this evening."

"And why not?"

"Well," she answered, "you have many liabilities--of different sorts."
With which she recalled what she had said to Fanny Assingham. "And then
you're so deep."

It produced in his features, in spite of his control of them, one of
those quick plays of expression, the shade of a grimace, that testified
as nothing else did to his race. "It's you, cara, who are deep."

Which, after an instant, she had accepted from him; she could so feel at
last that it was true. "Then I shall have need of it all."

"But what would you have done," he was by this time asking, "if I HADN'T
come in?"

"I don't know." She had hesitated. "What would you?"

"Oh; I oh--that isn't the question. I depend upon you. I go on. You would
have spoken to-morrow?"

"I think I would have waited."

"And for what?" he asked.

"To see what difference it would make for myself. My possession at last,
I mean, of real knowledge."

"Oh!" said the Prince.

"My only point now, at any rate," she went on, "is the difference, as I
say, that it may make for YOU. Your knowing was--from the moment you did
come in--all I had in view." And she sounded it again--he should have it
once more. "Your knowing that I've ceased--"

"That you've ceased--?" With her pause, in fact, she had fairly made him
press her for it.

"Why, to be as I was. NOT to know."

It was once more then, after a little, that he had had to stand
receptive; yet the singular effect of this was that there was still
something of the same sort he was made to want. He had another
hesitation, but at last this odd quantity showed. "Then does any one
else know?"

It was as near as he could come to naming her father, and she kept him
at that distance. "Any one--?"

"Any one, I mean, but Fanny Assingham."

"I should have supposed you had had by this time particular means of
learning. I don't see," she said, "why you ask me."

Then, after an instant--and only after an instant, as she saw--he made
out what she meant; and it gave her, all strangely enough, the still
further light that Charlotte, for herself, knew as little as he had
known. The vision loomed, in this light, it fairly glared, for the
few seconds--the vision of the two others alone together at Fawns, and
Charlotte, as one of them, having gropingly to go on, always not knowing
and not knowing! The picture flushed at the same time