gain wondered. "Are you so very sure their opportunities
are better?"

"Well," his wife asked, "what is their whole so extraordinary situation,
their extraordinary relation, but an opportunity?"

"Ah, my dear, you have that opportunity--of their extraordinary
situation and relation--as much as they."

"With the difference, darling," she returned with some spirit, "that
neither of those matters are, if you please, mine. I see the boat
they're in, but I'm not, thank God, in it myself. To-day, however," Mrs.
Assingham added, "to-day in Eaton Square I did see."

"Well then, what?"

But she mused over it still. "Oh, many things. More, somehow, than ever
before. It was as if, God help me, I was seeing FOR them--I mean for the
others. It was as if something had happened--I don't know what, except
some effect of these days with them at that place--that had either made
things come out or had cleared my own eyes." These eyes indeed of the
poor lady's rested on her companion's, meanwhile, with the lustre not
so much of intenser insight as of a particular portent that he had at
various other times had occasion to recognise. She desired, obviously,
to reassure him, but it apparently took a couple of large, candid,
gathering, glittering tears to emphasise the fact. They had immediately,
for him, their usual direct action: she must reassure him, he was made
to feel, absolutely in her own way. He would adopt it and conform to it
as soon as he should be able to make it out. The only thing was that it
took such incalculable twists and turns. The twist seemed remarkable
for instance as she developed her indication of what had come out in the
afternoon. "It was as if I knew better than ever what makes them--"

"What makes them?"--he pressed her as she fitfully dropped.

"Well, makes the Prince and Charlotte take it all as they do. It might
well have been difficult to know HOW to take it; and they may even
say for themselves that they were a long time trying to see. As I say,
to-day," she went on, "it was as if I were suddenly, with a kind of
horrible push, seeing through their eyes." On which, as to shake off her
perversity, Fanny Assingham sprang up. But she remained there, under the
dim illumination, and while the Colonel, with his high, dry, spare
look of "type," to which a certain conformity to the whiteness of
inaccessible snows in his necktie, shirt-front and waistcoat gave a
rigour of accent, waited, watching her, they might,