indistinguishable, perhaps, happily, in the dusk. She was making
an effort that horribly hurt her, and, as she couldn't cry out,
her eyes swam in her silence. With them, all the same, through
the square opening beside her, through the grey panorama of the
London night, she achieved the feat of not losing sight of what
she wanted; and her lips helped and protected her by being able
to be gay. "It's not to leave YOU, my dear--for that he'll give
up anything; just as he would go off anywhere, I think, you know,
if you would go with him. I mean you and he alone," Maggie
pursued with her gaze out of her window.

For which Amerigo's answer again took him a moment. "Ah, the dear
old boy! You would like me to propose him something--?"

"Well, if you think you could bear it."

"And leave," the Prince asked, "you and Charlotte alone?"

"Why not?" Maggie had also to wait a minute, but when she spoke
it came clear. "Why shouldn't Charlotte be just one of MY
reasons--my not liking to leave her? She has always been so good,
so perfect, to me--but never so wonderfully as just now. We have
somehow been more together--thinking, for the time, almost only
of each other; it has been quite as in old days." And she
proceeded consummately, for she felt it as consummate: "It's as
if we had been missing each other, had got a little apart--though
going on so side by side. But the good moments, if one only waits
for them," she hastened to add, "come round of themselves.
Moreover you've seen for yourself, since you've made it up so to
father; feeling, for yourself, in your beautiful way, every