Or must you do it in three guesses--like forfeits on Christmas eve ?" To which, as his ribaldry but dropped from her, he further added: "How much of anything will have to be left for you to be able to go on with it ?" "I shall go on," Fanny Assingham a trifle grimly declared, "while there's a scrap as big as your nail.

But we're not yet, luckily, reduced only to that." She had another pause, holding the while the thread of that larger perception into which her view of Mrs.Verver's obligation to Maggie had suddenly expanded.

"Even if her debt was not to the others--even then it ought to be quite sufficiently to the Prince himself to keep her straight.

For what, really, did the Prince do," she asked herself, "but generously trust her?
What did he do but take it from her that if she felt herself willing it was because she felt herself strong?
That creates for her, upon my word," Mrs.Assingham pursued, "a duty of considering him, of honourably repaying his trust, which--well, which she'll be really a fiend if she doesn't make the law of her conduct.

I mean of course his trust that she wouldn't interfere with him--expressed by his holding himself quiet at the critical time." The brougham was nearing home, and it was perhaps this sense of ebbing opportunity that caused the Colonel's next meditation to flower in a fashion almost surprising to his wife.