uch, and that if he'd
but say the word they'd nip straight out together by an independent door
and be sure to find her motor in the court. What word he had found to
say, he was afterward to reflect, must have little enough mattered;
for he was to have kept, of what then occurred, but a single other
impression, that of her great fragrant rustle beside him over the rest
of the ample room and toward their nearest and friendliest resource, the
door by which he had come in and which gave directly upon a staircase.
This independent image was just that of the only other of his
fellow-guests with whom he had been closely concerned; he had thought
of him rather indeed, up to that moment, as the Princess's
fellow-Olympian--but a new momentary vision of him seemed now to qualify
it.

The young Lord had reappeared within a minute on the threshold, that
of the passage from the supper-room, lately crossed by the Princess
herself, and Berridge felt him there, saw him there, wondered about him
there, all, for the first minute, without so much as a straight look
at him. He would have come to learn the reason of his friend's
extraordinary public demonstration--having more right to his curiosity,
or his anxiety or whatever, than any one else; he would be taking in
the remarkable appearances that thus completed it, and would perhaps be
showing quite a different face for them, at the point they had reached,
than any that would have hitherto consorted with the beautiful security
of his own position. So much, on our own young man's part, for this
first flush of a presumption that he might have stirred the germs of ire
in a celestial breast; so much for the moment during which nothing
would have induced him to betray, to a possibly rueful member of an
old aristocracy, a vulgar elation or a tickled, unaccustomed glee. His
inevitable second thought was, however, it has to be confessed, another
matter, which took a different turn--for, frankly, all the conscious
conqueror in him, as Amy Evans would again have said, couldn't forego a
probably supreme consecration. He treated himself to no prolonged reach
of vision, but there was something he nevertheless fully measured for
five seconds--the sharp truth of the fact, namely, of how the interested
observer in the doorway must really have felt about him. Rather
disconcertingly, hereupon, the sharp truth proved to be that the most
amused, quite the most encouraging and the least invidious of smiles
gr