e
long windows and passed out to the balcony, she asked herself but for
a few seconds if reality, should she follow him, would overtake or meet
her there. She followed him of necessity--it came, absolutely, so near
to his inviting her, by stepping off into temporary detachment, to
give the others something of the chance that she and her husband had so
fantastically discussed. Beside him then, while they hung over the great
dull place, clear and almost coloured now, coloured with the odd, sad,
pictured, "old-fashioned" look that empty London streets take on in
waning afternoons of the summer's end, she felt once more how impossible
such a passage would have been to them, how it would have torn them to
pieces, if they had so much as suffered its suppressed relations to peep
out of their eyes. This danger would doubtless indeed have been more to
be reckoned with if the instinct of each--she could certainly at least
answer for her own--had not so successfully acted to trump up other
apparent connexions for it, connexions as to which they could pretend to
be frank.

"You mustn't stay on here, you know," Adam Verver said as a result of
his unobstructed outlook. "Fawns is all there for you, of course--to
the end of my tenure. But Fawns so dismantled," he added with mild
ruefulness, "Fawns with half its contents, and half its best things,
removed, won't seem to you, I'm afraid, particularly lively."

"No," Maggie answered, "we should miss its best things. Its best things,
my dear, have certainly been removed. To be back there," she went on,
"to be back there--!" And she paused for the force of her idea.

"Oh, to be back there without anything good--!" But she didn't hesitate
now; she brought her idea forth. "To be back there without Charlotte is
more than I think would do." And as she smiled at him with it, so she
saw him the next instant take it--take it in a way that helped her
smile to pass all for an allusion to what she didn't and couldn't
say. This quantity was too clear--that she couldn't at such an hour be
pretending to name to him what it was, as he would have said, "going to
be," at Fawns or anywhere else, to want for HIM. That was now--and in a
manner exaltedly, sublimely--out of their compass and their question;
so that what was she doing, while they waited for the Principino,
while they left the others together and their tension just sensibly
threatened, what was she doing but just offer a bold but substantial
s