She took her time to think.  “I grant you not—­in the matter of ours.”  And then as he again fixed her with his hard yearning, which he couldn’t keep down:  “The question is so much bigger than that.  You see how much what I know makes of it for me.”  That was what acted on him, this iteration of her knowledge, into the question of the validity, of the various bearings of which, he couldn’t on the spot trust himself to pretend, in any high way, to go.  What her claim, as she made it, represented for him—­that he couldn’t help betraying, if only as a consequence of the effect of the word itself, her repeated distinct “know, know,” on his nerves.  She was capable of being sorry for his nerves at a time when he should need them for dining out, pompously, rather responsibly, without his heart in it; yet she was not to let that prevent her using, with all economy, so precious a chance for supreme clearness.  “I didn’t force this upon you, you must recollect, and it probably wouldn’t have happened for you if you hadn’t come in.”

“Ah,” said the Prince, “I was liable to come in, you know.”

“I didn’t think you were this evening.”

“And why not?”

“Well,” she answered, “you have many liabilities—­of different sorts.”  With which she recalled what she had said to Fanny Assingham.  “And then you’re so deep.”

It produced in his features, in spite of his control of them, one of those quick plays of expression, the shade of a grimace, that testified as nothing else did to his race.  “It’s you, cara, who are deep.”

Which, after an instant, she had accepted from him; she could so feel at last that it was true.  “Then I shall have need of it all.”

“But what would you have done,” he was by this time asking, “if I hadn’t come in?”

“I don’t know.”  She had hesitated.  “What would you?”

“Oh; io—­that isn’t the question.  I depend upon you.  I go on.  You would have spoken to-morrow?”

“I think I would have waited.”

“And for what?” he asked.

“To see what difference it would make for myself.  My possession at last, I mean, of real knowledge.”

“Oh!” said the Prince.

“My only point now, at any rate,” she went on, “is the difference, as I say, that it may make for you.  Your knowing was—­from the moment you did come in—­all I had in view.”  And she sounded it again—­he should have it once more.  “Your knowing that I’ve ceased—­”

“That you’ve ceased—?” With her pause, in fact, she had fairly made him press her for it.

“Why, to be as I was.  Not to know.”

It was once more then, after a little, that he had had to stand receptive; yet the singular effect of this was that there was still something of the same sort he was made to want.  He had another hesitation, but at last this odd quantity showed.  “Then does any one else know?”

It was as near as he could come to naming her father, and she kept him at that distance.  “Any one—?”