s more knowing
than the others, who had promptly taken, singly or in couples, to a
closer inspection of the fine small scattered treasures of the studio?

He himself stood there, rueful and stricken, nursing a silly red-bound
book under his arm very much as if he might have been holding on tight
to an upright stake, or to the nearest piece of furniture, during some
impression of a sharp earthquake-shock or of an attack of dyspeptic
dizziness; albeit indeed that he wasn't conscious of this absurd, this
instinctive nervous clutch till the thing that was to be more wonderful
than any yet suddenly flared up for him--the sight of the Princess again
on the threshold of the room, poised there an instant, in her
exquisite grace, for recovery of some one or of something, and then, at
recognition of him, coming straight to him across the empty place as if
he alone, and nobody and nothing else, were what she incredibly wanted.
She was there, she was radiantly _at_ him, as if she had known and loved
him for ten years--ten years during which, however, she had never quite
been able, in spite of undiscouraged attempts, to cure him, as goddesses
_had_ to cure shepherds, of his mere mortal shyness.

"Ah no, not _that_ one!" she said at once, with her divine familiarity;
for she had in the flash of an eye "spotted" the particular literary
production he seemed so very fondly to have possessed himself of and
against which all the Amy Evans in her, as she would doubtless have put
it, clearly wished on the spot to discriminate. She pulled it away from
him; he let it go; he scarce knew what was happening--only made out that
she distinguished the right one, the one that should have been shown
him, as blue or green or purple, and intimated that her other friend,
her fellow-Olympian, as Berridge had thought of him from the
first, really did too clumsily bungle matters, poor dear, with his
officiousness over the red one! She went on really as if she had come
for that, some such rectification, some such eagerness of reunion with
dear Mr. Berridge, some talk, after all the tiresome music, of questions
really urgent; while, thanks to the supreme strangeness of it, the high
tide of golden fable floated him afresh, and her pretext and her plea,
the queerness of her offered motive, melted away after the fashion of
the enveloping clouds that do their office in epics and idylls. "You
didn't perhaps know I'm Amy Evans," she smiled, "or even perhaps that