He watched her as if she left him positively under the impression of her mastery of her subject; yes, as if the real upshot of the drama before them was but that he had, when it came to the tight places of life—­as life had shrunk for him now—­the most luminous of wives.  He turned off, in this view of her majestic retreat, the comparatively faint little electric lamp which had presided over their talk; then he went up as immediately behind her as the billows of her amber train allowed, making out how all the clearness they had conquered was even for herself a relief—­how at last the sense of the amplitude of her exposition sustained and floated her.  Joining her, however, on the landing above, where she had already touched a metallic point into light, he found she had done perhaps even more to create than to extinguish in him the germ of a curiosity.  He held her a minute longer —­there was another plum in the pie.  “What did you mean some minutes ago by his not caring for Charlotte?”

“The Prince’s?  By his not ‘really’ caring?” She recalled, after a little, benevolently enough.  “I mean that men don’t, when it has all been too easy.  That’s how, in nine cases out of ten, a woman is treated who has risked her life.  You asked me just now how he works,” she added; “but you might better perhaps have asked me how he plays.”

Well, he made it up.  “Like a Prince?”

“Like a Prince.  He is, profoundly, a Prince.  For that,” she said with expression, “he’s—­beautifully—­a case.  They’re far rarer, even in the ‘highest circles,’ than they pretend to be—­and that’s what makes so much of his value.  He’s perhaps one of the very last—­the last of the real ones.  So it is we must take him.  We must take him all round.”

The Colonel considered.  “And how must Charlotte—­if anything happens—­take him?”

The question held her a minute, and while she waited, with her eyes on him, she put out a grasping hand to his arm, in the flesh of which he felt her answer distinctly enough registered.  Thus she gave him, standing off a little, the firmest, longest, deepest injunction he had ever received from her.  “Nothing —­in spite of everything—­will happen.  Nothing has happened.  Nothing is happening.”

He looked a trifle disappointed.  “I see.  For us.”

“For us.  For whom else?” And he was to feel indeed how she wished him to understand it.  “We know nothing on earth—!” It was an undertaking he must sign.

So he wrote, as it were, his name.  “We know nothing on earth.”  It was like the soldiers’ watchword at night.

“We’re as innocent,” she went on in the same way, “as babes.”

“Why not rather say,” he asked, “as innocent as they themselves are?”

“Oh, for the best of reasons!  Because we’re much more so.”

He wondered.  “But how can we be more—?”

“For them?  Oh, easily!  We can be anything.”