e of the inn."

"What is it then?"

"There are two--you'll see. But I've chosen the right one. And I think I
remember the tomb," she smiled.

"Oh, the tomb--!" Any tomb would do for him. "But I mean I had been
keeping my idea so cleverly for you, while there you already were with
it."

"You had been keeping it 'for' me as much as you like. But how do you
make out," she asked, "that you were keeping it FROM me?"

"I don't--now. How shall I ever keep anything--some day when I shall
wish to?"

"Ah, for things I mayn't want to know, I promise you shall find me
stupid." They had reached their door, where she herself paused to
explain. "These days, yesterday, last night, this morning, I've wanted
everything."

Well, it was all right. "You shall have everything."

XXIII

Fanny, on her arrival in town, carried out her second idea, despatching
the Colonel to his club for luncheon and packing her maid into a cab,
for Cadogan Place, with the variety of their effects. The result of this
for each of the pair was a state of occupation so unbroken that the day
practically passed without fresh contact between them. They dined out
together, but it was both in going to their dinner and in coming back
that they appeared, on either side, to have least to communicate.
Fanny was wrapped in her thoughts still more closely than in the
lemon-coloured mantle that protected her bare shoulders, and her
husband, with her silence to deal with, showed himself not less disposed
than usual, when so challenged, to hold up, as he would have said, his
end of it. They had, in general, in these days, longer pauses and more
abrupt transitions; in one of which latter they found themselves, for a
climax, launched at midnight. Mrs. Assingham, rather wearily housed
again, ascended to the first floor, there to sink, overburdened, on the
landing outside the drawing-room, into a great gilded Venetian chair--of
which at first, however, she but made, with her brooding face, a sort of
throne of meditation. She would thus have recalled a little, with her so
free orientalism of type, the immemorially speechless Sphinx about at
last to become articulate. The Colonel, not unlike, on his side, some
old pilgrim of the desert camping at the foot of that monument, went, by
way of reconnoissance, into the drawing-room. He visited, according to
his wont, the windows and their fastenings; he cast round the place the
eye, all at once,