the very morrow, how thumpingly
her heart had beaten at this foretaste of their being left together:
she should judge at leisure the surrender she was making to the
consciousness of complications about to be bodily lifted. She should
judge at leisure even that avidity for an issue which was making so
little of any complication but the unextinguished presence of the
others; and indeed that she was already simplifying so much more than
her husband came out for her next in the face with which he listened.
He might certainly well be puzzled, in respect to his father-in-law
and Mrs. Verver, by her glance at their possible preference for a
concentrated evening. "But it isn't--is it?" he asked--"as if they were
leaving each other?"

"Oh no; it isn't as if they were leaving each other. They're only
bringing to a close--without knowing when it may open again--a time that
has been, naturally, awfully interesting to them." Yes, she could talk
so of their "time"--she was somehow sustained; she was sustained even to
affirm more intensely her present possession of her ground. "They have
their reasons--many things to think of; how can one tell? But there's
always, also, the chance of his proposing to me that we shall have our
last hours together; I mean that he and I shall. He may wish to take
me off to dine with him somewhere alone--and to do it in memory of old
days. I mean," the Princess went on, "the real old days; before my grand
husband was invented and, much more, before his grand wife was: the
wonderful times of his first great interest in what he has since done,
his first great plans and opportunities, discoveries and bargains. The
way we've sat together late, ever so late, in foreign restaurants, which
he used to like; the way that, in every city in Europe, we've stayed on
and on, with our elbows on the table and most of the lights put out, to
talk over things he had that day seen or heard of or made his offer for,
the things he had secured or refused or lost! There were places he took
me to--you wouldn't believe!--for often he could only have left me with
servants. If he should carry me off with him to-night, for old sake's
sake, to the Earl's Court Exhibition, it will be a little--just a very,
very little--like our young adventures." After which while Amerigo
watched her, and in fact quite because of it, she had an inspiration, to
which she presently yielded. If he was wondering what she would say
next she had found exactl