Prince's aide-de-camp would reappear in the form of a direct
proposal. Lansing himself would probably--as the one person in
the Hicks entourage with whom one could intelligibly commune-be
entrusted with the next step in the negotiations: he would be
asked, as the aide-de-camp would have said, "to feel the
ground." It was clearly part of the state policy of Teutoburg
to offer Miss Hicks, with the hand of its sovereign, an
opportunity to replenish its treasury.

What would the girl do? Lansing could not guess; yet he dimly
felt that her attitude would depend in a great degree upon his
own. And he knew no more what his own was going to be than on
the night, four months earlier, when he had flung out of his
wife's room in Venice to take the midnight express for Genoa.

The whole of his past, and above all the tendency, on which he
had once prided himself, to live in the present and take
whatever chances it offered, now made it harder for him to act.
He began to see that he had never, even in the closest relations
of life, looked ahead of his immediate satisfaction. He had
thought it rather fine to be able to give himself so intensely
to the fullness of each moment instead of hurrying past it in
pursuit of something more, or something else, in the manner of
the over-scrupulous or the under-imaginative, whom he had always
grouped together and equally pitied. It was not till he had
linked his life with Susy's that he had begun to feel it
reaching forward into a future he longed to make sure of, to
fasten upon and shape to his own wants and purposes, till, by an
imperceptible substitution, that future had become his real
present, his all-absorbing moment of time.