The Colonel took it—­but took it at first in silence.  “Do you mean they’ve told you—?”

“No—­I mean nothing so absurd.  For in the first place I haven’t asked them, and in the second their word in such a matter wouldn’t count.”

“Oh,” said the Colonel with all his oddity, “they’d tell us.”

It made her face him an instant as with her old impatience of his short cuts, always across her finest flower-beds; but she felt, none the less, that she kept her irony down.  “Then when they’ve told you, you’ll be perhaps so good as to let me know.”

He jerked up his chin, testing the growth of his beard with the back of his hand while he fixed her with a single eye.  “Ah, I don’t say that they’d necessarily tell me that they are over the traces.”

“They’ll necessarily, whatever happens, hold their tongues, I hope, and I’m talking of them now as I take them for myself only.  That’s enough for me—­it’s all I have to regard.”  With which, after an instant, “They’re wonderful,” said Fanny Assingham.

“Indeed,” her husband concurred, “I really think they are.”

“You’d think it still more if you knew.  But you don’t know—­ because you don’t see.  Their situation”—­this was what he didn’t see—­“is too extraordinary.”

“’Too’?” He was willing to try.

“Too extraordinary to be believed, I mean, if one didn’t see.  But just that, in a way, is what saves them.  They take it seriously.”

He followed at his own pace.  “Their situation?”

“The incredible side of it.  They make it credible.”

“Credible then—­you do say—­to you?”

She looked at him again for an interval.  “They believe in it themselves.  They take it for what it is.  And that,” she said, “saves them.”

“But if what it ‘is’ is just their chance—?”

“It’s their chance for what I told you when Charlotte first turned up.  It’s their chance for the idea that I was then sure she had.”

The Colonel showed his effort to recall.  “Oh, your idea, at different moments, of any one of their ideas!” This dim procession, visibly, mustered before him, and, with the best will in the world, he could but watch its immensity.  “Are you speaking now of something to which you can comfortably settle down?”

Again, for a little, she only glowered at him.  “I’ve come back to my belief, and that I have done so—­”

“Well?” he asked as she paused.

“Well, shows that I’m right—­for I assure you I had wandered far.  Now I’m at home again, and I mean,” said Fanny Assingham, “to stay here.  They’re beautiful,” she declared.

“The Prince and Charlotte?”

“The Prince and Charlotte.  That’s how they’re so remarkable.  And the beauty,” she explained, “is that they’re afraid for them.  Afraid, I mean, for the others.”

“For Mr. Verver and Maggie?” It did take some following.  “Afraid of what?”