She was high, she was lucid, she was almost inspired; and it was but the deeper drop therefore to her husband’s flat common sense. “In other words Maggie is, by her ignorance, in danger? Then if she’s in danger, there IS danger.”

“There WON’T be—with Charlotte’s understanding of it. That’s where she has had her conception of being able to be heroic, of being able in fact to be sublime. She is, she will be”—the good lady by this time glowed. “So she sees it—to become, for her best friend, an element of POSITIVE safety.”

Bob Assingham looked at it hard. “Which of them do you call her best friend?”

She gave a toss of impatience. “I’ll leave you to discover!” But the grand truth thus made out she had now completely adopted. “It’s for US, therefore, to be hers.”

“‘Hers’?”

“You and I. It’s for us to be Charlotte’s. It’s for us, on our side, to see HER through.”

“Through her sublimity?”

“Through her noble, lonely life. Only—that’s essential—it mustn’t be lonely. It will be all right if she marries.”

“So we’re to marry her?”

“We’re to marry her. It will be,” Mrs. Assingham continued, “the great thing I can do.” She made it out more and more. “It will make up.”

“Make up for what?” As she said nothing, however, his desire for lucidity renewed itself. “If everything’s so all right what is there to make up for?”

“Why, if I did do either of them, by any chance, a wrong. If I made a mistake.”

“You’ll make up for it by making another?” And then as she again took her time: “I thought your whole point is just that you’re sure.”

“One can never be ideally sure of anything. There are always possibilities.”

“Then, if we can but strike so wild, why keep meddling?”

It made her again look at him. “Where would you have been, my dear, if I hadn’t meddled with YOU?”

“Ah, that wasn’t meddling—I was your own. I was your own,” said the Colonel, “from the moment I didn’t object.”

“Well, these people won’t object. They are my own too—in the sense that I’m awfully fond of them. Also in the sense,” she continued, “that I think they’re not so very much less fond of me. Our relation, all round, exists—it’s a reality, and a very good one; we’re mixed up, so to speak, and it’s too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it. Therefore to see that Charlotte gets a good husband as soon as possible—that, as I say, will be one of my ways of living. It will cover,” she said with conviction, “all the ground.” And then as his own conviction appeared to continue as little to match: “The ground, I mean, of any nervousness I may ever feel. It will be in fact my duty and I shan’t rest till my duty’s performed.” She had arrived by this time at something like exaltation. “I shall give, for the next year or two if necessary, my life to it. I shall have done in that case what I can.”

He took it at last as it came. “You hold there’s no limit to what you ‘can’?”

“I don’t say there’s no limit, or anything of the sort. I say there are good chances—enough of them for hope. Why shouldn’t there be when a girl is, after all, all that she is?”

“By after ‘all’ you mean after she’s in love with somebody else?”

The Colonel put his question with a quietude doubtless designed to be fatal; but it scarcely pulled her up. “She’s not too much in love not herself to want to marry. She would now particularly like to.”

“Has she told you so?”

“Not yet. It’s too soon. But she will. Meanwhile, however, I don’t require the information. Her marrying will prove the truth.”

“And what truth?”

“The truth of everything I say.”

“Prove it to whom?”

“Well, to myself, to begin with. That will be enough for me—to work for her. What it will prove,” Mrs. Assingham presently went on, “will be that she’s cured. That she accepts the situation.”

He paid this the tribute of a long pull at his pipe. “The situation of doing the one thing she can that will really seem to cover her tracks?”

His wife looked at him, the good dry man, as if now at last he was merely vulgar. “The one thing she can do that will really make new tracks altogether. The thing that, before any other, will be wise and right. The thing that will best give her her chance to be magnificent.”

He slowly emitted his smoke. “And best give you, by the same token, yours to be magnificent with her?”

“I shall be as magnificent, at least, as I can.”

Bob Assingham got up. “And you call ME immoral?”

She hesitated. “I’ll call you stupid if you prefer. But stupidity pushed to a certain point IS, you know, immorality. Just so what is morality but high intelligence?” This he was unable to tell her; which left her more definitely to conclude. “Besides, it’s all, at the worst, great fun.”

“Oh, if you simply put it at THAT—!”

His implication was that in this case they had a common ground; yet even thus he couldn’t catch her by it. “Oh, I don’t mean,” she said from the threshold, “the fun that you mean. Good-night.” In answer to which, as he turned out the electric light, he gave an odd, short groan, almost a grunt. He HAD apparently meant some particular kind.

“Well, now I must tell you, for I want to be absolutely honest.” So Charlotte spoke, a little ominously, after they had got into the Park. “I don’t want to pretend, and I can’t pretend a moment longer. You may think of me what you will, but I don’t care. I knew I shouldn’t and I find now how little. I came back for this. Not really for anything else. For this,” she repeated as, under the influence of her tone, the Prince had already come to a pause.

“For ‘this’?” He spoke as if the particular thing she indicated were vague to him—or were, rather, a quantity that couldn’t, at the most, be much.

It would be as much, however, as she should be able to make it. “To have one hour alone with you.” It had rained heavily in the night, and though the pavements were now dry, thanks to a cleansing breeze, the August morning, with its hovering, thick-drifting clouds and freshened air, was cool and grey. The multitudinous green of the Park had been deepened, and a wholesome smell of irrigation, purging the place of dust and of odours less acceptable, rose from the earth. Charlotte had looked about her, with expression, from the first of their coming in, quite as if for a deep greeting, for general recognition: the day was, even in the heart of London, of a rich, low-browed, weatherwashed English type. It was as if it had been waiting for her, as if she knew it, placed it, loved it, as if it were in fact a part of what she had come back for. So far as this was the case the impression of course could only be lost on a mere vague Italian; it was one of those for which you had to be, blessedly, an American—as indeed you had to be, blessedly, an American for all sorts of things: so long as you hadn’t, blessedly or not, to remain in America. The Prince had, by half-past ten—as also by definite appointment—called in Cadogan Place for Mrs. Assingham’s visitor, and then, after brief delay, the two had walked together up Sloane Street and got straight into the Park from Knightsbridge. The understanding to this end had taken its place, after a couple of days, as inevitably consequent on the appeal made by the girl during those first moments in Mrs. Assingham’s drawing-room. It was an appeal the couple of days had done nothing to invalidate—everything, much rather, to place in a light, and as to which, obviously, it wouldn’t have fitted that anyone should raise an objection. Who was there, for that matter, to raise one, from the moment Mrs. Assingham, informed and apparently not disapproving, didn’t intervene? This the young man had asked himself—with a very sufficient sense of what would have made him ridiculous. He wasn’t going to begin—that at least was certain—by showing a fear. Even had fear at first been sharp in him, moreover, it would already, not a little, have dropped; so happy, all round, so propitious, he quite might have called it, had been the effect of this rapid interval.

The time had been taken up largely by his active reception of his own wedding-guests and by Maggie’s scarce less absorbed entertainment of her friend, whom she had kept for hours together in Portland Place; whom she had not, as wouldn’t have been convenient, invited altogether as yet to migrate, but who had been present, with other persons, his contingent, at luncheon, at tea, at dinner, at perpetual repasts—he had never in his life, it struck him, had to reckon with so much eating—whenever he had looked in. If he had not again, till this hour, save for a minute, seen Charlotte alone, so, positively, all the while, he had not seen even Maggie; and if, therefore, he had not seen even Maggie, nothing was more natural than that he shouldn’t have seen Charlotte. The exceptional minute, a mere snatch, at the tail of the others, on the huge Portland Place staircase had sufficiently enabled the girl to remind him—so ready she assumed him to be—of what they were to do. Time pressed if they were to do it at all. Everyone had brought gifts; his relations had brought wonders—how did they still have, where did they still find, such treasures? She only had brought nothing, and she was ashamed; yet even by the sight of the rest of the tribute she wouldn’t be put off. She would do what she could, and he was, unknown to Maggie, he must remember, to give her his aid. He had prolonged the minute so far as to take time to hesitate, for a reason, and then to risk bringing his reason out. The risk was because he might hurt her—hurt her pride, if she had that particular sort. But she might as well be hurt one way as another; and, besides, that particular sort of pride was just what she hadn’t. So his slight resistance, while they lingered, had been just easy enough not to be impossible.

“I hate to encourage you—and for such a purpose, after all—to spend your money.”

She had stood a stair or two below him; where, while she looked up at him beneath the high, domed light of the hall, she rubbed with her palm the polished mahogany of the balustrade, which was mounted on fine ironwork, eighteenth-century English. “Because you think I must have so little? I’ve enough, at any rate—enough for us to take our hour. Enough,” she had smiled, “is as good as a feast! And then,” she had said, “it isn’t of course a question of anything expensive, gorged with treasure as Maggie is; it isn’t a question of competing or outshining. What, naturally, in the way of the priceless, hasn’t she got? Mine is to be the offering of the poor—something, precisely, that—no rich person COULD ever give her, and that, being herself too rich ever to buy it, she would therefore never have.” Charlotte had spoken as if after so much thought. “Only, as it can’t be fine, it ought to be funny—and that’s the sort of thing to hunt for. Hunting in London, besides, is amusing in itself.”

He recalled even how he had been struck with her word. “‘Funny’?” “Oh, I don’t mean a comic toy—I mean some little thing with a charm. But absolutely RIGHT, in its comparative cheapness. That’s what I call funny,” she had explained. “You used,” she had also added, “to help me to get things cheap in Rome. You were splendid for beating down. I have them all still, I needn’t say—the little bargains I there owed you. There are bargains in London in August.”

“Ah, but I don’t understand your English buying, and I confess I find it dull.” So much as that, while they turned to go up together, he had objected. “I understood my poor dear Romans.”

“It was they who understood you—that was your pull,” she had laughed. “Our amusement here is just that they don’t understand us. We can make it amusing. You’ll see.”

If he had hesitated again it was because the point permitted. “The amusement surely will be to find our present.”

“Certainly—as I say.”

“Well, if they don’t come down—?”

“Then we’ll come up. There’s always something to be done. Besides, Prince,” she had gone on, “I’m not, if you come to that, absolutely a pauper. I’m too poor for some things,” she had said—yet, strange as she was, lightly enough; “but I’m not too poor for others.” And she had paused again at the top. “I’ve been saving up.”

He had really challenged it. “In America?”

“Yes, even there—with my motive. And we oughtn’t, you know,” she had wound up, “to leave it beyond to-morrow.”

That, definitely, with ten words more, was what had passed—he feeling all the while how any sort of begging-off would only magnify it. He might get on with things as they were, but he must do anything rather than magnify. Besides which it was pitiful to make her beg of him. He WAS making her—she had begged; and this, for a special sensibility in him, didn’t at all do. That was accordingly, in fine, how they had come to where they were: he was engaged, as hard as possible, in the policy of not magnifying. He had kept this up even on her making a point—and as if it were almost the whole point—that Maggie of course was not to have an idea. Half the interest of the thing at least would be that she shouldn’t suspect; therefore he was completely to keep it from her—as Charlotte on her side would—that they had been anywhere at all together or had so much as seen each other for five minutes alone. The absolute secrecy of their little excursion was in short of the essence; she appealed to his kindness to let her feel that he didn’t betray her. There had been something, frankly, a little disconcerting in such an appeal at such an hour, on the very eve of his nuptials: it was one thing to have met the girl casually at Mrs. Assingham’s and another to arrange with her thus for a morning practically as private as their old mornings in Rome and practically not less intimate. He had immediately told Maggie, the same evening, of the minutes that had passed between them in Cadogan Place—though not mentioning those of Mrs. Assingham’s absence any more than he mentioned the fact of what their friend had then, with such small delay, proposed. But what had briefly checked his assent to any present, to any positive making of mystery—what had made him, while they stood at the top of the stairs, demur just long enough for her to notice it—was the sense of the resemblance of the little plan before him to occasions, of the past, from which he was quite disconnected, from which he could only desire to be. This was like beginning something over, which was the last thing he wanted. The strength, the beauty of his actual position was in its being wholly a fresh start, was that what it began would be new altogether. These items of his consciousness had clustered so quickly that by the time Charlotte read them in his face he was in presence of what they amounted to. She had challenged them as soon as read them, had met them with a “Do you want then to go and tell her?” that had somehow made them ridiculous. It had made him, promptly, fall back on minimizing it—that is on minimizing “fuss.” Apparent scruples were, obviously, fuss, and he had on the spot clutched, in the light of this truth, at the happy principle that would meet every case.

This principle was simply to be, with the girl, always simple—and with the very last simplicity. That would cover everything. It had covered, then and there, certainly, his immediate submission to the sight of what was clearest. This was, really, that what she asked was little compared to what she gave. What she gave touched him, as she faced him, for it was the full tune of her renouncing. She really renounced—renounced everything, and without even insisting now on what it had all been for her. Her only insistence was her insistence on the small matter of their keeping their appointment to themselves. That, in exchange for “everything,” everything she gave up, was verily but a trifle. He let himself accordingly be guided; he so soon assented, for enlightened indulgence, to any particular turn she might wish the occasion to take, that the stamp of her preference had been well applied to it even while they were still in the Park. The application in fact presently required that they should sit down a little, really to see where they were; in obedience to which propriety they had some ten minutes, of a quality quite distinct, in a couple of penny-chairs under one of the larger trees. They had taken, for their walk, to the cropped, rain-freshened grass, after finding it already dry; and the chairs, turned away from the broad alley, the main drive and the aspect of Park Lane, looked across the wide reaches of green which seemed in a manner to refine upon their freedom. They helped Charlotte thus to make her position—her temporary position—still more clear, and it was for this purpose, obviously, that, abruptly, on seeing her opportunity, she sat down. He stood for a little before her, as if to mark the importance of not wasting time, the importance she herself had previously insisted on; but after she had said a few words it was impossible for him not to resort again to good-nature. He marked as he could, by this concession, that if he had finally met her first proposal for what would be “amusing” in it, so any idea she might have would contribute to that effect. He had consequently—in all consistency—to treat it as amusing that she reaffirmed, and reaffirmed again, the truth that was HER truth.

“I don’t care what you make of it, and I don’t ask anything whatever of you—anything but this. I want to have said it—that’s all; I want not to have failed to say it. To see you once and be with you, to be as we are now and as we used to be, for one small hour—or say for two—that’s what I have had for weeks in my head. I mean, of course, to get it BEFORE—before what you’re going to do. So, all the while, you see,” she went on with her eyes on him, “it was a question for me if I should be able to manage it in time. If I couldn’t have come now I probably shouldn’t have come at all—perhaps even ever. Now that I’m here I shall stay, but there were moments, over there, when I despaired. It wasn’t easy—there were reasons; but it was either this or nothing. So I didn’t struggle, you see, in vain. AFTER—oh, I didn’t want that! I don’t mean,” she smiled, “that it wouldn’t have been delightful to see you even then—to see you at any time; but I would never have come for it. This is different. This is what I wanted. This is what I’ve got. This is what I shall always have. This is what I should have missed, of course,” she pursued, “if you had chosen to make me miss it. If you had thought me horrid, had refused to come, I should, naturally, have been immensely ‘sold.’ I had to take the risk. Well, you’re all I could have hoped. That’s what I was to have said. I didn’t want simply to get my time with you, but I wanted you to know. I wanted you”—she kept it up, slowly, softly, with a small tremor of voice, but without the least failure of sense or sequence—“I wanted you to understand. I wanted you, that is, to hear. I don’t care, I think, whether you understand or not. If I ask nothing of you I don’t—I mayn’t—ask even so much as that. What you may think of me—that doesn’t in the least matter. What I want is that it shall always be with you—so that you’ll never be able quite to get rid of it—that I DID. I won’t say that you did—you may make as little of that as you like. But that I was here with you where we are and as we are—I just saying this. Giving myself, in other words, away—and perfectly willing to do it for nothing. That’s all.”

She paused as if her demonstration was complete—yet, for the moment, without moving; as if in fact to give it a few minutes to sink in; into the listening air, into the watching space, into the conscious hospitality of nature, so far as nature was, all Londonised, all vulgarised, with them there; or even, for that matter, into her own open ears, rather than into the attention of her passive and prudent friend. His attention had done all that attention could do; his handsome, slightly anxious, yet still more definitely “amused” face sufficiently played its part. He clutched, however, at what he could best clutch at—the fact that she let him off, definitely let him off. She let him off, it seemed, even from so much as answering; so that while he smiled back at her in return for her information he felt his lips remain closed to the successive vaguenesses of rejoinder, of objection, that rose for him from within. Charlotte herself spoke again at last—“You may want to know what I get by it. But that’s my own affair.” He really didn’t want to know even this—or continued, for the safest plan, quite to behave as if he didn’t; which prolonged the mere dumbness of diversion in which he had taken refuge. He was glad when, finally—the point she had wished to make seeming established to her satisfaction—they brought to what might pass for a close the moment of his life at which he had had least to say. Movement and progress, after this, with more impersonal talk, were naturally a relief; so that he was not again, during their excursion, at a loss for the right word. The air had been, as it were, cleared; they had their errand itself to discuss, and the opportunities of London, the sense of the wonderful place, the pleasures of prowling there, the question of shops, of possibilities, of particular objects, noticed by each in previous prowls. Each professed surprise at the extent of the other’s knowledge; the Prince in especial wondered at his friend’s possession of her London. He had rather prized his own possession, the guidance he could really often give a cabman; it was a whim of his own, a part of his Anglomania, and congruous with that feature, which had, after all, so much more surface than depth. When his companion, with the memory of other visits and other rambles, spoke of places he hadn’t seen and things he didn’t know, he actually felt again—as half the effect—just a shade humiliated. He might even have felt a trifle annoyed—if it hadn’t been, on this spot, for his being, even more, interested. It was a fresh light on Charlotte and on her curious world-quality, of which, in Rome, he had had his due sense, but which clearly would show larger on the big London stage. Rome was, in comparison, a village, a family-party, a little old-world spinnet for the fingers of one hand. By the time they reached the Marble Arch it was almost as if she were showing him a new side, and that, in fact, gave amusement a new and a firmer basis. The right tone would be easy for putting himself in her hands. Should they disagree a little—frankly and fairly—about directions and chances, values and authenticities, the situation would be quite gloriously saved. They were none the less, as happened, much of one mind on the article of their keeping clear of resorts with which Maggie would be acquainted. Charlotte recalled it as a matter of course, named it in time as a condition—they would keep away from any place to which he had already been with Maggie.

This made indeed a scant difference, for though he had during the last month done few things so much as attend his future wife on her making of purchases, the antiquarii, as he called them with Charlotte, had not been the great affair. Except in Bond Street, really, Maggie had had no use for them: her situation indeed, in connection with that order of traffic, was full of consequences produced by her father’s. Mr. Verver, one of the great collectors of the world, hadn’t left his daughter to prowl for herself; he had little to do with shops, and was mostly, as a purchaser, approached privately and from afar. Great people, all over Europe, sought introductions to him; high personages, incredibly high, and more of them than would ever be known, solemnly sworn as everyone was, in such cases, to discretion, high personages made up to him as the one man on the short authentic list likely to give the price. It had therefore been easy to settle, as they walked, that the tracks of the Ververs, daughter’s as well as father’s, were to be avoided; the importance only was that their talk about it led for a moment to the first words they had as yet exchanged on the subject of Maggie. Charlotte, still in the Park, proceeded to them—for it was she who began—with a serenity of appreciation that was odd, certainly, as a sequel to her words of ten minutes before. This was another note on her—what he would have called another light—for her companion, who, though without giving a sign, admired, for what it was, the simplicity of her transition, a transition that took no trouble either to trace or to explain itself. She paused again an instant, on the grass, to make it; she stopped before him with a sudden “Anything of course, dear as she is, will do for her. I mean if I were to give her a pin-cushion from the Baker-Street Bazaar.”

“That’s exactly what I meant”—the Prince laughed out this allusion to their snatch of talk in Portland Place. “It’s just what I suggested.”

She took, however, no notice of the reminder; she went on in her own way. “But it isn’t a reason. In that case one would never do anything for her. I mean,” Charlotte explained, “if one took advantage of her character.”

“Of her character?”

“We mustn’t take advantage of her character,” the girl, again unheeding, pursued. “One mustn’t, if not for HER, at least for one’s self. She saves one such trouble.”

She had spoken thoughtfully, with her eyes on her friend’s; she might have been talking, preoccupied and practical, of someone with whom he was comparatively unconnected. “She certainly GIVES one no trouble,” said the Prince. And then as if this were perhaps ambiguous or inadequate: “She’s not selfish—God forgive her!—enough.”

“That’s what I mean,” Charlotte instantly said. “She’s not selfish enough. There’s nothing, absolutely, that one NEED do for her. She’s so modest,” she developed—“she doesn’t miss things. I mean if you love her—or, rather, I should say, if she loves you. She lets it go.”

The Prince frowned a little—as a tribute, after all, to seriousness. “She lets what—?”

“Anything—anything that you might do and that you don’t. She lets everything go but her own disposition to be kind to you. It’s of herself that she asks efforts—so far as she ever HAS to ask them. She hasn’t, much. She does everything herself. And that’s terrible.”

The Prince had listened; but, always with propriety, he didn’t commit himself. “Terrible?”

“Well, unless one is almost as good as she. It makes too easy terms for one. It takes stuff, within one, so far as one’s decency is concerned, to stand it. And nobody,” Charlotte continued in the same manner, “is decent enough, good enough, to stand it—not without help from religion, or something of that kind. Not without prayer and fasting—that is without taking great care. Certainly,” she said, “such people as you and I are not.”

The Prince, obligingly, thought an instant. “Not good enough to stand it?”

“Well, not good enough not rather to feel the strain. We happen each, I think, to be of the kind that are easily spoiled.”

Her friend, again, for propriety, followed the argument. “Oh, I don’t know. May not one’s affection for her do something more for one’s decency, as you call it, than her own generosity—her own affection, HER ‘decency’—has the unfortunate virtue to undo?”

“Ah, of course it must be all in that.”

But she had made her question, all the same, interesting to him. “What it comes to—one can see what you mean—is the way she believes in one. That is if she believes at all.”

“Yes, that’s what it comes to,” said Charlotte Stant.

“And why,” he asked, almost soothingly, “should it be terrible?” He couldn’t, at the worst, see that.

“Because it’s always so—the idea of having to pity people.”

“Not when there’s also, with it, the idea of helping them.”

“Yes, but if we can’t help them?”

“We CAN—we always can. That is,” he competently added, “if we care for them. And that’s what we’re talking about.”

“Yes”—she on the whole assented. “It comes back then to our absolutely refusing to be spoiled.”

“Certainly. But everything,” the Prince laughed as they went on—“all your ‘decency,’ I mean—comes back to that.”

She walked beside him a moment. “It’s just what I meant,” she then reasonably said.

The man in the little shop in which, well after this, they lingered longest, the small but interesting dealer in the Bloomsbury street who was remarkable for an insistence not importunate, inasmuch as it was mainly mute, but singularly, intensely coercive—this personage fixed on his visitors an extraordinary pair of eyes and looked from one to the other while they considered the object with which he appeared mainly to hope to tempt them. They had come to him last, for their time was nearly up; an hour of it at least, from the moment of their getting into a hansom at the Marble Arch, having yielded no better result than the amusement invoked from the first. The amusement, of course, was to have consisted in seeking, but it had also involved the idea of finding; which latter necessity would have been obtrusive only if they had found too soon. The question at present was if they were finding, and they put it to each other, in the Bloomsbury shop, while they enjoyed the undiverted attention of the shopman. He was clearly the master, and devoted to his business—the essence of which, in his conception, might precisely have been this particular secret that he possessed for worrying the customer so little that it fairly made for their relations a sort of solemnity. He had not many things, none of the redundancy of “rot” they had elsewhere seen, and our friends had, on entering, even had the sense of a muster so scant that, as high values obviously wouldn’t reign, the effect might be almost pitiful. Then their impression had changed; for, though the show was of small pieces, several taken from the little window and others extracted from a cupboard behind the counter—dusky, in the rather low-browed place, despite its glass doors—each bid for their attention spoke, however modestly, for itself, and the pitch of their entertainer’s pretensions was promptly enough given. His array was heterogeneous and not at all imposing; still, it differed agreeably from what they had hitherto seen.

Charlotte, after the incident, was to be full of impressions, of several of which, later on, she gave her companion—always in the interest of their amusement—the benefit; and one of the impressions had been that the man himself was the greatest curiosity they had looked at. The Prince was to reply to this that he himself hadn’t looked at him; as, precisely, in the general connection, Charlotte had more than once, from other days, noted, for his advantage, her consciousness of how, below a certain social plane, he never SAW. One kind of shopman was just like another to him—which was oddly inconsequent on the part of a mind that, where it did notice, noticed so much. He took throughout, always, the meaner sort for granted—the night of their meanness, or whatever name one might give it for him, made all his cats grey. He didn’t, no doubt, want to hurt them, but he imaged them no more than if his eyes acted only for the level of his own high head. Her own vision acted for every relation—this he had seen for himself: she remarked beggars, she remembered servants, she recognised cabmen; she had often distinguished beauty, when out with him, in dirty children; she had admired “type” in faces at hucksters’ stalls. Therefore, on this occasion, she had found their antiquario interesting; partly because he cared so for his things, and partly because he cared—well, so for them. “He likes his things—he loves them,” she was to say; “and it isn’t only—it isn’t perhaps even at all—that he loves to sell them. I think he would love to keep them if he could; and he prefers, at any rate, to sell them to right people. We, clearly, were right people—he knows them when he sees them; and that’s why, as I say, you could make out, or at least I could, that he cared for us. Didn’t you see”—she was to ask it with an insistence—“the way he looked at us and took us in? I doubt if either of us have ever been so well looked at before. Yes, he’ll remember us”—she was to profess herself convinced of that almost to uneasiness. “But it was after all”—this was perhaps reassuring—“because, given his taste, since he HAS taste, he was pleased with us, he was struck—he had ideas about us. Well, I should think people might; we’re beautiful—aren’t we?—and he knows. Then, also, he has his way; for that way of saying nothing with his lips when he’s all the while pressing you so with his face, which shows how he knows you feel it—that is a regular way.”

Of decent old gold, old silver, old bronze, of old chased and jewelled artistry, were the objects that, successively produced, had ended by numerously dotting the counter, where the shopman’s slim, light fingers, with neat nails, touched them at moments, briefly, nervously, tenderly, as those of a chess-player rest, a few seconds, over the board, on a figure he thinks he may move and then may not: small florid ancientries, ornaments, pendants, lockets, brooches, buckles, pretexts for dim brilliants, bloodless rubies, pearls either too large or too opaque for value; miniatures mounted with diamonds that had ceased to dazzle; snuffboxes presented to—or by—the too-questionable great; cups, trays, taper-stands, suggestive of pawn-tickets, archaic and brown, that would themselves, if preserved, have been prized curiosities. A few commemorative medals, of neat outline but dull reference; a classic monument or two, things of the first years of the century; things consular, Napoleonic, temples, obelisks, arches, tinily re-embodied, completed the discreet cluster; in which, however, even after tentative reinforcement from several quaint rings, intaglios, amethysts, carbuncles, each of which had found a home in the ancient sallow satin of some weakly-snapping little box, there was, in spite of the due proportion of faint poetry, no great force of persuasion. They looked, the visitors, they touched, they vaguely pretended to consider, but with scepticism, so far as courtesy permitted, in the quality of their attention. It was impossible they shouldn’t, after a little, tacitly agree as to the absurdity of carrying to Maggie a token from such a stock. It would be—that was the difficulty—pretentious without being “good”; too usual, as a treasure, to have been an inspiration of the giver, and yet too primitive to be taken as tribute welcome on any terms. They had been out more than two hours and, evidently, had found nothing. It forced from Charlotte a kind of admission.

“It ought, really, if it should be a thing of this sort, to take its little value from having belonged to one’s self.”

“Ecco!” said the Prince—just triumphantly enough. “There you are.”

Behind the dealer were sundry small cupboards in the wall. Two or three of these Charlotte had seen him open, so that her eyes found themselves resting on those he had not visited. But she completed her admission. “There’s nothing here she could wear.”

It was only after a moment that her companion rejoined. “Is there anything—do you think—that you could?”

It made her just start. She didn’t, at all events, look at the objects; she but looked for an instant very directly at him. “No.”

“Ah!” the Prince quietly exclaimed.

“Would it be,” Charlotte asked, “your idea to offer me something?”

“Well, why not—as a small ricordo.”

“But a ricordo of what?”

“Why, of ‘this’—as you yourself say. Of this little hunt.”

“Oh, I say it—but hasn’t my whole point been that I don’t ask you to. Therefore,” she demanded—but smiling at him now—“where’s the logic?”

“Oh, the logic—!” he laughed.

“But logic’s everything. That, at least, is how I feel it. A ricordo from you—from you to me—is a ricordo of nothing. It has no reference.”

“Ah, my dear!” he vaguely protested. Their entertainer, meanwhile, stood there with his eyes on them, and the girl, though at this minute more interested in her passage with her friend than in anything else, again met his gaze. It was a comfort to her that their foreign tongue covered what they said—and they might have appeared of course, as the Prince now had one of the snuffboxes in his hand, to be discussing a purchase.

“You don’t refer,” she went on to her companion. “I refer.”

He had lifted the lid of his little box and he looked into it hard. “Do you mean by that then that you would be free—?”

“‘Free’—?”

“To offer me something?”

This gave her a longer pause, and when she spoke again she might have seemed, oddly, to be addressing the dealer. “Would you allow me—?”

“No,” said the Prince into his little box.

“You wouldn’t accept it from me?”

“No,” he repeated in the same way.

She exhaled a long breath that was like a guarded sigh. “But you’ve touched an idea that HAS been mine. It’s what I’ve wanted.” Then she added: “It was what I hoped.”

He put down his box—this had drawn his eyes. He made nothing, clearly, of the little man’s attention. “It’s what you brought me out for?”

“Well, that’s, at any rate,” she returned, “my own affair. But it won’t do?”

“It won’t do, cara mia.”

“It’s impossible?”

“It’s impossible.” And he took up one of the brooches.

She had another pause, while the shopman only waited. “If I were to accept from you one of these charming little ornaments as you suggest, what should I do with it?”

He was perhaps at last a little irritated; he even—as if HE might understand—looked vaguely across at their host. “Wear it, per Bacco!”

“Where then, please? Under my clothes?”

“Wherever you like. But it isn’t then, if you will,” he added, “worth talking about.”

“It’s only worth talking about, mio caro,” she smiled, “from your having begun it. My question is only reasonable—so that your idea may stand or fall by your answer to it. If I should pin one of these things on for you would it be, to your mind, that I might go home and show it to Maggie as your present?”

They had had between them often in talk the refrain, jocosely, descriptively applied, of “old Roman.” It had been, as a pleasantry, in the other time, his explanation to her of everything; but nothing, truly, had even seemed so old-Roman as the shrug in which he now indulged. “Why in the world not?”

“Because—on our basis—it would be impossible to give her an account of the pretext.”

“The pretext—?” He wondered.

“The occasion. This ramble that we shall have had together and that we’re not to speak of.”

“Oh yes,” he said after a moment “I remember we’re not to speak of it.”

“That of course you’re pledged to. And the one thing, you see, goes with the other. So you don’t insist.”

He had again, at random, laid back his trinket; with which he quite turned to her, a little wearily at last—even a little impatiently. “I don’t insist.”

It disposed for the time of the question, but what was next apparent was that it had seen them no further. The shopman, who had not stirred, stood there in his patience—which, his mute intensity helping, had almost the effect of an ironic comment. The Prince moved to the glass door and, his back to the others, as with nothing more to contribute, looked—though not less patiently—into the street. Then the shopman, for Charlotte, momentously broke silence. “You’ve seen, disgraziatamente, signora principessa,” he sadly said, “too much”—and it made the Prince face about. For the effect of the momentous came, if not from the sense, from the sound of his words; which was that of the suddenest, sharpest Italian. Charlotte exchanged with her friend a glance that matched it, and just for the minute they were held in check. But their glance had, after all, by that time, said more than one thing; had both exclaimed on the apprehension, by the wretch, of their intimate conversation, let alone of her possible, her impossible, title, and remarked, for mutual reassurance, that it didn’t, all the same, matter. The Prince remained by the door, but immediately addressing the speaker from where he stood.

“You’re Italian then, are you?”

But the reply came in English. “Oh dear no.”

“You’re English?”

To which the answer was this time, with a smile, in briefest Italian. “Che!” The dealer waived the question—he practically disposed of it by turning straightway toward a receptacle to which he had not yet resorted and from which, after unlocking it, he extracted a square box, of some twenty inches in height, covered with worn-looking leather. He placed the box on the counter, pushed back a pair of small hooks, lifted the lid and removed from its nest a drinking-vessel larger than a common cup, yet not of exorbitant size, and formed, to appearance, either of old fine gold or of some material once richly gilt. He handled it with tenderness, with ceremony, making a place for it on a small satin mat. “My Golden Bowl,” he observed—and it sounded, on his lips, as if it said everything. He left the important object—for as “important” it did somehow present itself—to produce its certain effect. Simple, but singularly elegant, it stood on a circular foot, a short pedestal with a slightly spreading base, and, though not of signal depth, justified its title by the charm of its shape as well as by the tone of its surface. It might have been a large goblet diminished, to the enhancement of its happy curve, by half its original height. As formed of solid gold it was impressive; it seemed indeed to warn off the prudent admirer. Charlotte, with care, immediately took it up, while the Prince, who had after a minute shifted his position again, regarded it from a distance.

It was heavier than Charlotte had thought. “Gold, really gold?” she asked of their companion.

He hesitated. “Look a little, and perhaps you’ll make out.”

She looked, holding it up in both her fine hands, turning it to the light. “It may be cheap for what it is, but it will be dear, I’m afraid, for me.”

“Well,” said the man, “I can part with it for less than its value. I got it, you see, for less.”

“For how much then?”

Again he waited, always with his serene stare. “Do you like it then?”

Charlotte turned to her friend. “Do YOU like it?” He came no nearer; he looked at their companion. “Cos’e?”

“Well, signori miei, if you must know, it’s just a perfect crystal.”

“Of course we must know, per Dio!” said the Prince. But he turned away again—he went back to his glass door.

Charlotte set down the bowl; she was evidently taken. “Do you mean it’s cut out of a single crystal?”

“If it isn’t I think I can promise you that you’ll never find any joint or any piecing.”

She wondered. “Even if I were to scrape off the gold?”

He showed, though with due respect, that she amused him. “You couldn’t scrape it off—it has been too well put on; put on I don’t know when and I don’t know how. But by some very fine old worker and by some beautiful old process.”

Charlotte, frankly charmed with the cup, smiled back at him now. “A lost art?”

“Call it a lost art,”

“But of what time then is the whole thing?”

“Well, say also of a lost time.”

The girl considered. “Then if it’s so precious, how comes it to be cheap?”

Her interlocutor once more hung fire, but by this time the Prince had lost patience. “I’ll wait for you out in the air,” he said to his companion, and, though he spoke without irritation, he pointed his remark by passing immediately into the street, where, during the next minutes, the others saw him, his back to the shopwindow, philosophically enough hover and light a fresh cigarette. Charlotte even took, a little, her time; she was aware of his funny Italian taste for London street-life.

Her host meanwhile, at any rate, answered her question. “Ah, I’ve had it a long time without selling it. I think I must have been keeping it, madam, for you.”

“You’ve kept it for me because you’ve thought I mightn’t see what’s the matter with it?”

He only continued to face her—he only continued to appear to follow the play of her mind. “What IS the matter with it?”

“Oh, it’s not for me to say; it’s for you honestly to tell me. Of course I know something must be.”

“But if it’s something you can’t find out, isn’t it as good as if it were nothing?”

“I probably SHOULD find out as soon as I had paid for it.”

“Not,” her host lucidly insisted, “if you hadn’t paid too much.”

“What do you call,” she asked, “little enough?”

“Well, what should you say to fifteen pounds?”

“I should say,” said Charlotte with the utmost promptitude, “that it’s altogether too much.”

The dealer shook his head slowly and sadly, but firmly. “It’s my price, madam—and if you admire the thing I think it really might be yours. It’s not too much. It’s too little. It’s almost nothing. I can’t go lower.”

Charlotte, wondering, but resisting, bent over the bowl again. “Then it’s impossible. It’s more than I can afford.”

“Ah,” the man returned, “one can sometimes afford for a present more than one can afford for one’s self.” He said it so coaxingly that she found herself going on without, as might be said, putting him in his place. “Oh, of course it would be only for a present—!”

“Then it would be a lovely one.”

“Does one make a present,” she asked, “of an object that contains, to one’s knowledge, a flaw?”

“Well, if one knows of it one has only to mention it. The good faith,” the man smiled, “is always there.”

“And leave the person to whom one gives the thing, you mean, to discover it?”

“He wouldn’t discover it—if you’re speaking of a gentleman.”

“I’m not speaking of anyone in particular,” Charlotte said.

“Well, whoever it might be. He might know—and he might try. But he wouldn’t find.”

She kept her eyes on him as if, though unsatisfied, mystified, she yet had a fancy for the bowl. “Not even if the thing should come to pieces?” And then as he was silent: “Not even if he should have to say to me ‘The Golden Bowl is broken’?”

He was still silent; after which he had his strangest smile. “Ah, if anyone should WANT to smash it—!”

She laughed; she almost admired the little man’s expression. “You mean one could smash it with a hammer?”

“Yes; if nothing else would do. Or perhaps even by dashing it with violence—say upon a marble floor.”

“Oh, marble floors!” But she might have been thinking—for they were a connection, marble floors; a connection with many things: with her old Rome, and with his; with the palaces of his past, and, a little, of hers; with the possibilities of his future, with the sumptuosities of his marriage, with the wealth of the Ververs. All the same, however, there were other things; and they all together held for a moment her fancy. “Does crystal then break—when it IS crystal? I thought its beauty was its hardness.”

Her friend, in his way, discriminated. “Its beauty is its BEING crystal. But its hardness is certainly, its safety. It doesn’t break,” he went on, “like vile glass. It splits—if there is a split.”

“Ah!”—Charlotte breathed with interest. “If there is a split.” And she looked down again at the bowl. “There IS a split, eh? Crystal does split, eh?”

“On lines and by laws of its own.”

“You mean if there’s a weak place?”

For all answer, after an hesitation, he took the bowl up again, holding it aloft and tapping it with a key. It rang with the finest, sweetest sound. “Where is the weak place?”

She then did the question justice. “Well, for ME, only the price. I’m poor, you see—very poor. But I thank you and I’ll think.” The Prince, on the other side of the shop-window, had finally faced about and, as to see if she hadn’t done, was trying to reach, with his eyes, the comparatively dim interior. “I like it,” she said—“I want it. But I must decide what I can do.”

The man, not ungraciously, resigned himself. “Well, I’ll keep it for you.”

The small quarter-of-an-hour had had its marked oddity—this she felt even by the time the open air and the Bloomsbury aspects had again, in their protest against the truth of her gathered impression, made her more or less their own. Yet the oddity might have been registered as small as compared to the other effect that, before they had gone much further, she had, with her companion, to take account of. This latter was simply the effect of their having, by some tacit logic, some queer inevitability, quite dropped the idea of a continued pursuit. They didn’t say so, but it was on the line of giving up Maggie’s present that they practically proceeded—the line of giving it up without more reference to it. The Prince’s first reference was in fact quite independently made. “I hope you satisfied yourself, before you had done, of what was the matter with that bowl.”

“No indeed, I satisfied myself of nothing. Of nothing at least but that the more I looked at it the more I liked it, and that if you weren’t so unaccommodating this would be just the occasion for your giving me the pleasure of accepting it.”

He looked graver for her, at this, than he had looked all the morning. “Do you propose it seriously—without wishing to play me a trick?”

She wondered. “What trick would it be?”

He looked at her harder. “You mean you really don’t know?”

“But know what?”

“Why, what’s the matter with it. You didn’t see, all the while?”

She only continued, however, to stare. “How could you see—out in the street?”

“I saw before I went out. It was because I saw that I did go out. I didn’t want to have another scene with you, before that rascal, and I judged you would presently guess for yourself.”

“Is he a rascal?” Charlotte asked. “His price is so moderate.” She waited but a moment. “Five pounds. Really so little.”

“Five pounds?”

He continued to look at her. “Five pounds.”

He might have been doubting her word, but he was only, it appeared, gathering emphasis. “It would be dear—to make a gift of—at five shillings. If it had cost you even but five pence I wouldn’t take it from you.”

“Then,” she asked, “what IS the matter?”

“Why, it has a crack.”

It sounded, on his lips, so sharp, it had such an authority, that she almost started, while her colour, at the word, rose. It was as if he had been right, though his assurance was wonderful. “You answer for it without having looked?”

“I did look. I saw the object itself. It told its story. No wonder it’s cheap.”

“But it’s exquisite,” Charlotte, as if with an interest in it now made even tenderer and stranger, found herself moved to insist.

“Of course it’s exquisite. That’s the danger.” Then a light visibly came to her—a light in which her friend suddenly and intensely showed. The reflection of it, as she smiled at him, was in her own face. “The danger—I see—is because you’re superstitious.”

“Per Dio, I’m superstitious! A crack is a crack—and an omen’s an omen.”

“You’d be afraid—?”

“Per Bacco!”

“For your happiness?”

“For my happiness.”

“For your safety?”

“For my safety.”

She just paused. “For your marriage?”

“For my marriage. For everything.”

She thought again. “Thank goodness then that if there BE a crack we know it! But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don’t know—!” And she smiled with the sadness of it. “We can never then give each other anything.”

He considered, but he met it. “Ah, but one does know. I do, at least—and by instinct. I don’t fail. That will always protect me.”

It was funny, the way he said such things; yet she liked him, really, the more for it. They fell in for her with a general, or rather with a special, vision. But she spoke with a mild despair.

“What then will protect ME?”

“Where I’m concerned I will. From me at least you’ve nothing to fear,” he now quite amiably responded. “Anything you consent to accept from me—” But he paused.

“Well?”

“Well, shall be perfect.”

“That’s very fine,” she presently answered. “It’s vain, after all, for you to talk of my accepting things when you’ll accept nothing from me.”

Ah, THERE, better still, he could meet her. “You attach an impossible condition. That, I mean, of my keeping your gift so to myself.”

Well, she looked, before him there, at the condition—then, abruptly, with a gesture, she gave it up. She had a headshake of disenchantment—so far as the idea had appealed to her. It all appeared too difficult. “Oh, my ‘condition’—I don’t hold to it. You may cry it on the housetops—anything I ever do.”

“Ah well, then—!” This made, he laughed, all the difference.

But it was too late. “Oh, I don’t care now! I SHOULD have liked the Bowl. But if that won’t do there’s nothing.”

He considered this; he took it in, looking graver again; but after a moment he qualified. “Yet I shall want some day to give you something.”

She wondered at him. “What day?”

“The day you marry. For you WILL marry. You must—SERIOUSLY—marry.”

She took it from him, but it determined in her the only words she was to have uttered, all the morning, that came out as if a spring had been pressed. “To make you feel better?”

“Well,” he replied frankly, wonderfully—“it will. But here,” he added, “is your hansom.”

He had signalled—the cab was charging. She put out no hand for their separation, but she prepared to get in. Before she did so, however, she said what had been gathering while she waited. “Well, I would marry, I think, to have something from you in all freedom.”