e higher, rose with each moment that he invited her thus to see him
linger; and when, after a little more, he had said, smoking again and
looking up, with head thrown back and hands spread on the balcony rail,
at the grey, gaunt front of the house, "She's beautiful, beautiful!"
her sensibility reported to her the shade of a new note. It was all she
might have wished, for it was, with a kind of speaking competence, the
note of possession and control; and yet it conveyed to her as nothing
till now had done the reality of their parting. They were parting, in
the light of it, absolutely on Charlotte's VALUE--the value that was
filling the room out of which they had stepped as if to give it play,
and with which the Prince, on his side, was perhaps making larger
acquaintance. If Maggie had desired, at so late an hour, some last
conclusive comfortable category to place him in for dismissal, she might
have found it here in its all coming back to his ability to rest upon
high values. Somehow, when all was said, and with the memory of her
gifts, her variety, her power, so much remained of Charlotte's! What
else had she herself meant three minutes before by speaking of her as
great? Great for the world that was before her--that he proposed she
should be: she was not to be wasted in the application of his plan.
Maggie held to this then--that she wasn't to be wasted. To let his
daughter know it he had sought this brief privacy. What a blessing,
accordingly, that she could speak her joy in it! His face, meanwhile,
at all events, was turned to her, and as she met his eyes again her joy
went straight. "It's success, father."

"It's success. And even this," he added as the Principino, appearing
alone, deep within, piped across an instant greeting--"even this isn't
altogether failure!"

They went in to receive the boy, upon whose introduction to the room
by Miss Bogle Charlotte and the Prince got up--seemingly with an
impressiveness that had caused Miss Bogle not to give further effect
to her own entrance. She had retired, but the Principino's presence, by
itself, sufficiently broke the tension--the subsidence of which, in the
great room, ten minutes later, gave to the air something of the quality
produced by the cessation of a sustained rattle. Stillness, when the
Prince and Princess returned from attending the visitors to their
carriage, might have been said to be not so much restored as created;
so that whatever next took place in it