It was desired to find for you, at the eleventh hour, some small wedding-present--a hunt, for something worth giving you, and yet possible from other points of view as well, in which it seemed I could be of use.

You were naturally not to be told--precisely because it was all FOR you.

We went forth together and we looked; we rummaged about and, as I remember we called it, we prowled; then it was that, as I freely recognise, we came across that crystal cup--which I'm bound to say, upon my honour, I think it rather a pity Fanny Assingham, from whatever good motive, should have treated so." He had kept his hands in his pockets; he turned his eyes again, but more complacently now, to the ruins of the precious vessel; and Maggie could feel him exhale into the achieved quietness of his explanation a long, deep breath of 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.