comparative relief.  Behind everything, beneath everything, it was somehow a comfort to him at last to be talking with her—­and he seemed to be proving to himself that he could talk.  “It was at a little shop in Bloomsbury—­I think I could go to the place now.  The man understood Italian, I remember; he wanted awfully to work off his bowl.  But I didn’t believe in it, and we didn’t take it.”

Maggie had listened with an interest that wore all the expression of candour.  “Oh, you left it for me.  But what did you take?”

He looked at her; first as if he were trying to remember, then as if he might have been trying to forget.  “Nothing, I think—­at that place.”

“What did you take then at any other?  What did you get me—­since that was your aim and end—­for a wedding-gift?”

The Prince continued very nobly to bethink himself.  “Didn’t we get you anything?”

Maggie waited a little; she had for some time, now, kept her eyes on him steadily; but they wandered, at this, to the fragments on her chimney.  “Yes; it comes round, after all, to your having got me the bowl.  I myself was to come upon it, the other day, by so wonderful a chance; was to find it in the same place and to have it pressed upon me by the same little man, who does, as you say, understand Italian.  I did ‘believe in it,’ you see—­must have believed in it somehow instinctively; for I took it as soon as I saw it.  Though I didn’t know at all then,” she added, “what I was taking with it.”

The Prince paid her for an instant, visibly, the deference of trying to imagine what this might have been.  “I agree with you that the coincidence is extraordinary—­the sort of thing that happens mainly in novels and plays.  But I don’t see, you must let me say, the importance or the connexion—­”

“Of my having made the purchase where you failed of it?” She had quickly taken him up; but she had, with her eyes on him once more, another drop into the order of her thoughts, to which, through whatever he might say, she was still adhering.  “It’s not my having gone into the place, at the end of four years, that makes the strangeness of the coincidence; for don’t such chances as that, in London, easily occur?  The strangeness,” she lucidly said, “is in what my purchase was to represent to me after I had got it home; which value came,” she explained, “from the wonder of my having found such a friend.”

“’Such a friend’?” As a wonder, assuredly, her husband could but take it.

“As the little man in the shop.  He did for me more than he knew—­ I owe it to him.  He took an interest in me,” Maggie said; “and, taking that interest, he recalled your visit, he remembered you and spoke of you to me.”

On which the Prince passed the comment of a sceptical smile.  “Ah but, my dear, if extraordinary things come from people’s taking an interest in you—­”

“My life in that case,” she asked, “must be very agitated?  Well, he liked me, I mean—­very particularly.  It’s only so I can account for my afterwards hearing from him—­and in fact he gave me that to-day,” she pursued, “he gave me it frankly as his reason.”