THE GOLDEN BOWL
works," she added; "but you might better perhaps have asked me how he plays."
Well, he made it up. "Like a Prince?"
"Like a Prince. He is profoundly a Prince. For that," she said with expression, "he's—beautifully—a case. They're far rarer, even in the 'highest circles,' than they pretend to be—and that's what makes so much of his value. He's perhaps one of the very last—the last of the real ones. So it is we must take him. We must take him all round."
The Colonel considered. "And how must Charlotte—if anything happens—take him?"
The question held her a minute, and while she waited with her eyes on him she put out a grasping hand to his arm, in the flesh of which he felt her answer distinctly enough registered. Thus she gave him, standing off a little, the firmest longest deepest injunction he had ever received from her. "Nothing—in spite of everything—will happen. Nothing has happened. Nothing is happening."
He looked a trifle disappointed. "I see. For us."
"For us. For whom else? " And he was to feel indeed how she wished him to understand it. "We know nothing on earth—!" It was an undertaking he must sign.
So he wrote, as it were, his name. "We know nothing on earth." It was like the soldiers' watchword at night.
"We're as innocent," she went on in the same way, "as babes."
"Why not rather say," he asked, "as innocent as they themselves are?"
400
