The Prince had looked, with the question, as if this, again, could trouble him, and it determined in his companion a slight impatience.  “You keep talking about such things as if they were our affair at all.  I feel, at any rate, that I’ve nothing to do with her doubts and fears, or with anything she may feel.  She must arrange all that for herself.  It’s enough for me that she’ll always be, of necessity, much more afraid for herself, really, either to see or to speak, than we should be to have her do it even if we were the idiots and cowards we aren’t.”  And Charlotte’s face, with these words—­to the mitigation of the slightly hard ring there might otherwise have been in them—­ fairly lightened, softened, shone out.  It reflected as really never yet the rare felicity of their luck.  It made her look for the moment as if she had actually pronounced that word of unpermitted presumption—­so apt is the countenance, as with a finer consciousness than the tongue, to betray a sense of this particular lapse.  She might indeed, the next instant, have seen her friend wince, in advance, at her use of a word that was already on her lips; for it was still unmistakable with him that there were things he could prize, forms of fortune he could cherish, without at all proportionately liking their names.  Had all this, however, been even completely present to his companion, what other term could she have applied to the strongest and simplest of her ideas but the one that exactly fitted it?  She applied it then, though her own instinct moved her, at the same time, to pay her tribute to the good taste from which they hadn’t heretofore by a hair’s breadth deviated.  “If it didn’t sound so vulgar I should say that we’re—­fatally, as it were—­safe.  Pardon the low expression—­since it’s what we happen to be.  We’re so because they are.  And they’re so because they can’t be anything else, from the moment that, having originally intervened for them, she wouldn’t now be able to bear herself if she didn’t keep them so.  That’s the way she’s inevitably with us,” said Charlotte over her smile.  “We hang, essentially, together.”

Well, the Prince candidly allowed she did bring it home to him.  Every way it worked out.  “Yes, I see.  We hang, essentially, together.”

His friend had a shrug—­a shrug that had a grace.  “Cosa volete?” The effect, beautifully, nobly, was more than Roman.  “Ah, beyond doubt, it’s a case.”

He stood looking at her.  “It’s a case.  There can’t,” he said, “have been many.”

“Perhaps never, never, never any other.  That,” she smiled, “I confess I should like to think.  Only ours.”

“Only ours—­most probably.  Speriamo.”  To which, as after hushed connections, he presently added:  “Poor Fanny!” But Charlotte had already, with a start and a warning hand, turned from a glance at the clock.  She sailed away to dress, while he watched her reach the staircase.  His eyes followed her till, with a simple swift look round at him, she vanished.  Something in the sight, however, appeared to have renewed the spring of his last exclamation, which he breathed again upon the air.  “Poor, poor Fanny!”