“Well, even you?” Maggie pressed as he paused.  “Even I, even I even yet—!” Again he paused and the silence held them.

But Maggie at last broke it.  “If Charlotte doesn’t understand me, it is that I’ve prevented her.  I’ve chosen to deceive her and to lie to her.”

The Prince kept his eyes on her.  “I know what you’ve chosen to do.  But I’ve chosen to do the same.”

“Yes,” said Maggie after an instant—­“my choice was made when I had guessed yours.  But you mean,” she asked, “that she understands you?”

“It presents small difficulty!”

“Are you so sure?” Maggie went on.

“Sure enough.  But it doesn’t matter.”  He waited an instant; then looking up through the fumes of his smoke, “She’s stupid,” he abruptly opined.

“O—­oh!” Maggie protested in a long wail.

It had made him in fact quickly change colour.  “What I mean is that she’s not, as you pronounce her, unhappy.”  And he recovered, with this, all his logic.  “Why is she unhappy if she doesn’t know?”

“Doesn’t know—?” She tried to make his logic difficult.

“Doesn’t know that you know.”

It came from him in such a way that she was conscious, instantly, of three or four things to answer.  But what she said first was:  “Do you think that’s all it need take?” And before he could reply, “She knows, she knows!” Maggie proclaimed.

“Well then, what?”

But she threw back her head, she turned impatiently away from him.  “Oh, I needn’t tell you!  She knows enough.  Besides,” she went on, “she doesn’t believe us.”

It made the Prince stare a little.  “Ah, she asks too much!” That drew, however, from his wife another moan of objection, which determined in him a judgment.  “She won’t let you take her for unhappy.”

“Oh, I know better than any one else what she won’t let me take her for!”

“Very well,” said Amerigo, “you’ll see.”

“I shall see wonders, I know.  I’ve already seen them, and I’m prepared for them.”  Maggie recalled—­she had memories enough.  “It’s terrible”—­her memories prompted her to speak.  “I see it’s always terrible for women.”

The Prince looked down in his gravity.  “Everything’s terrible, cara, in the heart of man.  She’s making her life,” he said.  “She’ll make it.”

His wife turned back upon him; she had wandered to a table, vaguely setting objects straight.  “A little by the way then too, while she’s about it, she’s making ours.”  At this he raised his eyes, which met her own, and she held him while she delivered herself of some thing that had been with her these last minutes.

“You spoke just now of Charlotte’s not having learned from you that I ‘know.’  Am I to take from you then that you accept and recognise my knowledge?”

He did the inquiry all the honours—­visibly weighed its importance and weighed his response.  “You think I might have been showing you that a little more handsomely?”