the rare felicity
of their luck. It made her look for the moment as if she had actually
pronounced that word of unpermitted presumption--so apt is the
countenance, as with a finer consciousness than the tongue, to betray a
sense of this particular lapse. She might indeed, the next instant, have
seen her friend wince, in advance, at her use of a word that was already
on her lips; for it was still unmistakable with him that there were
things he could prize, forms of fortune he could cherish, without at
all proportionately liking their names. Had all this, however, been
even completely present to his companion, what other term could she
have applied to the strongest and simplest of her ideas but the one that
exactly fitted it? She applied it then, though her own instinct moved
her, at the same time, to pay her tribute to the good taste from which
they hadn't heretofore by a hair's breadth deviated. "If it didn't sound
so vulgar I should say that we're--fatally, as it were--SAFE. Pardon the
low expression--since it's what we happen to be. We're so because they
are. And they're so because they can't be anything else, from the moment
that, having originally intervened for them, she wouldn't now be able to
bear herself if she didn't keep them so. That's the way she's inevitably
WITH us," said Charlotte over her smile. "We hang, essentially,
together."

Well, the Prince candidly allowed she did bring it home to him. Every
way it worked out. "Yes, I see. We hang, essentially, together."

His friend had a shrug--a shrug that had a grace. "Cosa volete?" The
effect, beautifully, nobly, was more than Roman. "Ah, beyond doubt, it's
a case."

He stood looking at her. "It's a case. There can't," he said, "have been
many."

"Perhaps never, never, never any other. That," she smiled, "I confess I
should like to think. Only ours."

"Only ours--most probably. Speriamo." To which, as after hushed
connections, he presently added: "Poor Fanny!" But Charlotte had
already, with a start and a warning hand, turned from a glance at
the clock. She sailed away to dress, while he watched her reach the
staircase. His eyes followed her till, with a simple swift look round
at him, she vanished. Something in the sight, however, appeared to have
renewed the spring of his last exclamation, which he breathed again upon
the air. "Poor, poor Fanny!"

It was to prove, however, on the morrow, quite consistent with the
spirit of these words that, the par