ed a little with the prospect; the high cool room, with its
afternoon shade, with its old tapestries uncovered, with the perfect
polish of its wide floor reflecting the bowls of gathered flowers and
the silver and linen of the prepared tea-table, drew from her a remark
in which this whole effect was mirrored, as well as something else
in the Prince's movement while he slowly paced and turned. "We're
distinctly bourgeois!" she a trifle grimly threw off, as an echo of
their old community; though to a spectator sufficiently detached they
might have been quite the privileged pair they were reputed, granted
only they were taken as awaiting the visit of Royalty. They might have
been ready, on the word passed up in advance, to repair together to the
foot of the staircase--the Prince somewhat in front, advancing indeed to
the open doors and even going down, for all his princedom, to meet, on
the stopping of the chariot, the august emergence. The time was stale,
it was to be admitted, for incidents of magnitude; the September hush
was in full possession, at the end of the dull day, and a couple of the
long windows stood open to the balcony that overhung the desolation--
the balcony from which Maggie, in the springtime, had seen Amerigo and
Charlotte look down together at the hour of her return from the Regent's
Park, near by, with her father, the Principino and Miss Bogle. Amerigo
now again, in his punctual impatience, went out a couple of times and
stood there; after which, as to report that nothing was in sight, he
returned to the room with frankly nothing else to do. The Princess
pretended to read; he looked at her as he passed; there hovered in
her own sense the thought of other occasions when she had cheated
appearances of agitation with a book. At last she felt him standing
before her, and then she raised her eyes.

"Do you remember how, this morning, when you told me of this event, I
asked you if there were anything particular you wished me to do? You
spoke of my being at home, but that was a matter of course. You spoke of
something else," he went on, while she sat with her book on her knee and
her raised eyes; "something that makes me almost wish it may happen.
You spoke," he said, "of the possibility of my seeing her alone. Do you
know, if that comes," he asked, "the use I shall make of it?" And then
as she waited: "The use is all before me."

"Ah, it's your own business now!" said his wife. But it had made her
rise.