, always a little nearer, and at
last he felt her boat bump. The bump was distinct, and in fact she
stepped ashore. "We were all wrong. There's nothing."

"Nothing--?" It was like giving her his hand up the bank.

"Between Charlotte Verver and the Prince. I was uneasy--but I'm
satisfied now. I was in fact quite mistaken. There's nothing."

"But I thought," said Bob Assingham, "that that was just what you did
persistently asseverate. You've guaranteed their straightness from the
first."

"No--I've never till now guaranteed anything but my own disposition to
worry. I've never till now," Fanny went on gravely from her chair, "had
such a chance to see and to judge. I had it at that place--if I had, in
my infatuation and my folly," she added with expression, "nothing
else. So I did see--I HAVE seen. And now I know." Her emphasis, as she
repeated the word, made her head, in her seat of infallibility, rise
higher. "I know."

The Colonel took it--but took it at first in silence. "Do you mean
they've TOLD you--?"

"No--I mean nothing so absurd. For in the first place I haven't asked
them, and in the second their word in such a matter wouldn't count."

"Oh," said the Colonel with all his oddity, "they'd tell US."

It made her face him an instant as with her old impatience of his short
cuts, always across her finest flower-beds; but she felt, none the less,
that she kept her irony down. "Then when they've told you, you'll be
perhaps so good as to let me know."

He jerked up his chin, testing the growth of his beard with the back
of his hand while he fixed her with a single eye. "Ah, I don't say that
they'd necessarily tell me that they ARE over the traces."

"They'll necessarily, whatever happens, hold their tongues, I hope, and
I'm talking of them now as I take them for myself only. THAT'S enough
for me--it's all I have to regard." With which, after an instant,
"They're wonderful," said Fanny Assingham.

"Indeed," her husband concurred, "I really think they are."

"You'd think it still more if you knew. But you don't know--because
you don't see. Their situation"--this was what he didn't see--"is too
extraordinary."

"'Too'?" He was willing to try.

"Too extraordinary to be believed, I mean, if one didn't see. But just
that, in a way, is what saves them. They take it seriously."

He followed at his own pace. "Their situation?"

"The incredible side of it. They make it credible."

"Credible then--you do say--to