“Ah, my dear,” she laughed, “I’ve seen you with Bradshaw!  It takes Anglo-Saxon blood.”

“’Blood’?” he echoed.  “You’ve that of every race!” It kept her before him.  “You’re terrible.”

Well, he could put it as he liked.  “I know the name of the inn.”

“What is it then?”

“There are two—­you’ll see.  But I’ve chosen the right one.  And I think I remember the tomb,” she smiled.

“Oh, the tomb—!” Any tomb would do for him.  “But I mean I had been keeping my idea so cleverly for you, while there you already were with it.”

“You had been keeping it ‘for’ me as much as you like.  But how do you make out,” she asked, “that you were keeping it from me?”

“I don’t—­now.  How shall I ever keep anything—­some day when I shall wish to?”

“Ah, for things I mayn’t want to know, I promise you shall find me stupid.”  They had reached their door, where she herself paused to explain.  “These days, yesterday, last night, this morning, I’ve wanted everything.”

Well, it was all right.  “You shall have everything.”

XXIII

Fanny, on her arrival in town, carried out her second idea, despatching the Colonel to his club for luncheon and packing her maid into a cab, for Cadogan Place, with the variety of their effects.  The result of this for each of the pair was a state of occupation so unbroken that the day practically passed without fresh contact between them.  They dined out together, but it was both in going to their dinner and in coming back that they appeared, on either side, to have least to communicate.  Fanny was wrapped in her thoughts still more closely than in the lemon-coloured mantle that protected her bare shoulders, and her husband, with her silence to deal with, showed himself not less disposed than usual, when so challenged, to hold up, as he would have said, his end of it.  They had, in general, in these days, longer pauses and more abrupt transitions; in one of which latter they found themselves, for a climax, launched at midnight.  Mrs. Assingham, rather wearily housed again, ascended to the first floor, there to sink, overburdened, on the landing outside the drawing-room, into a great gilded Venetian chair—­of which at first, however, she but made, with her brooding face, a sort of throne of meditation.  She would thus have recalled a little, with her so free orientalism of type, the immemorially speechless Sphinx about at last to become articulate.  The Colonel, not unlike, on his side, some old pilgrim of the desert camping at the foot of that monument, went, by way of reconnoissance, into the drawing-room.  He visited, according to his wont, the windows and their fastenings; he cast round the place the eye, all at once, of the master and the manager, the commandant and the rate-payer; then he came back to his wife, before whom, for a moment, he stood waiting.  But she herself, for a time, continued to wait, only looking up at him