t! I can keep them quiet at
the best, I seem to feel, simply by our being there. It will work, from
week to week, of itself. You'll see."

He was willing enough to see, but he desired to provide--! "Yet if it
doesn't work?"

"Ah, that's talking about the worst!"

Well, it might be; but what were they doing, from morning to night, at
this crisis, but talk? "Who'll keep the others?"

"The others--?"

"Who'll keep THEM quiet? If your couple have had a life together, they
can't have had it completely without witnesses, without the help of
persons, however few, who must have some knowledge, some idea about
them. They've had to meet, secretly, protectedly, they've had to
arrange; for if they haven't met, and haven't arranged, and haven't
thereby, in some quarter or other, had to give themselves away, why are
we piling it up so? Therefore if there's evidence, up and down London--"

"There must be people in possession of it? Ah, it isn't all," she always
remembered, "up and down London. Some of it must connect them--I mean,"
she musingly added, "it naturally WOULD--with other places; with who
knows what strange adventures, opportunities, dissimulations? But
whatever there may have been, it will also all have been buried on the
spot. Oh, they've known HOW--too beautifully! But nothing, all the same,
is likely to find its way to Maggie of itself."

"Because every one who may have anything to tell, you hold, will have
been so squared?" And then inveterately, before she could say--he
enjoyed so much coming to this: "What will have squared Lady
Castledean?"

"The consciousness"--she had never lost her promptness--"of having no
stones to throw at any one else's windows. She has enough to do to guard
her own glass. That was what she was doing," Fanny said, "that last
morning at Matcham when all of us went off and she kept the Prince
and Charlotte over. She helped them simply that she might herself be
helped--if it wasn't perhaps, rather, with her ridiculous Mr. Blint,
that HE might be. They put in together, therefore, of course, that day;
they got it clear--and quite under her eyes; inasmuch as they didn't
become traceable again, as we know, till late in the evening." On this
historic circumstance Mrs. Assingham was always ready afresh to brood;
but she was no less ready, after her brooding, devoutly to add "Only we
know nothing whatever else--for which all our stars be thanked!"

The Colonel's gratitude was apt to be less