THE GOLDEN BOWL
"Oh about that particular crime there's always much to say. It's always more interesting to us than any other crime—it has at least that for it. But of course I call everything I have in mind at all being loyal to Maggie. Being loyal to her is more than anything else helping her with her father—which is what she most wants and needs."
The Colonel had had it before, but he could apparently never have too much of it. "Helping her 'with' him—?"
"Helping her against him then. Against what we've already so fully talked of—its having to be recognised between them that he doubts. That's where my part is so plain—to see her through, to see her through to the end." Exaltation, for the moment, always lighted Mrs. Assingham's reference to this plainness; yet she at the same time seldom failed, the next instant, to qualify her view of it. "When I talk of my obligation as clear I mean that it's absolute; for just how, from day to day and through thick and thin, to keep the thing up is, I grant you, another matter. There's one way, luckily, nevertheless, in which I'm strong. I can so perfectly count on her."
The Colonel seldom failed here, as from the insidious growth of an excitement, to wonder, to encourage. "Not to see you're lying?"
"To stick to me fast, whatever she sees. If I stick to her—that is to my own poor struggling way, under providence, of watching over them all—she'll stand by me to the death. She won't give me away. For you know she easily can."
This, regularly, was the most lurid turn of their
124
