things instead of the right. If he could say the right everything
would come--it hung by a hair that everything might crystallise
for their recovered happiness at his touch. This possibility
glowed at her, however, for fifty seconds, only then to turn
cold, and as it fell away from her she felt the chill of reality
and knew again, all but pressed to his heart and with his breath
upon her cheek, the slim rigour of her attitude, a rigour beyond
that of her natural being. They had silences, at last, that were
almost crudities of mutual resistance--silences that persisted
through his felt effort to treat her recurrence to the part he
had lately played, to interpret all the sweetness of her so
talking to him, as a manner of making love to him. Ah, it was no
such manner, heaven knew, for Maggie; she could make love, if
this had been in question, better than that! On top of which it
came to her presently to say, keeping in with what she had
already spoken: "Except of course that, for the question of going
off somewhere, he'd go readily, quite delightedly, with you. I
verily believe he'd like to have you for a while to himself."

"Do you mean he thinks of proposing it?" the Prince after a
moment sounded.

"Oh no--he doesn't ask, as you must so often have seen. But I
believe he'd go 'like a shot,' as you say, if you were to suggest
it."

It had the air, she knew, of a kind of condition made, and she
had asked herself while she spoke if it wouldn't cause his arm to
let her go. The fact that it didn't suggested to her that she had
made him, of a sudden, still more intensely think, think with