flush of the streets begun to fade, the
possibilities of faces, on the August afternoon, were still one of the
notes of the scene. He was too restless--that was the fact--for any
concentration, and the last idea that would just now have occurred to
him in any connection was the idea of pursuit.

He had been pursuing for six months as never in his life before, and
what had actually unsteadied him, as we join him, was the sense of how
he had been justified. Capture had crowned the pursuit--or success,
as he would otherwise have put it, had rewarded virtue; whereby the
consciousness of these things made him, for the hour, rather serious
than gay. A sobriety that might have consorted with failure sat in his
handsome face, constructively regular and grave, yet at the same time
oddly and, as might be, functionally almost radiant, with its dark
blue eyes, its dark brown moustache and its expression no more sharply
"foreign" to an English view than to have caused it sometimes to be
observed of him with a shallow felicity that he looked like a "refined"
Irishman. What had happened was that shortly before, at three o'clock,
his fate had practically been sealed, and that even when one pretended
to no quarrel with it the moment had something of the grimness of a
crunched key in the strongest lock that could be made. There was nothing
to do as yet, further, but feel what one had done, and our personage
felt it while he aimlessly wandered. It was already as if he were
married, so definitely had the solicitors, at three o'clock, enabled the
date to be fixed, and by so few days was that date now distant. He was
to dine at half-past eight o'clock with the young lady on whose behalf,
and on whose father's, the London lawyers had reached an inspired
harmony with his own man of business, poor Calderoni, fresh from Rome
and now apparently in the wondrous situation of being "shown London,"
before promptly leaving it again, by Mr. Verver himself, Mr. Verver
whose easy way with his millions had taxed to such small purpose, in the
arrangements, the principle of reciprocity. The reciprocity with which
the Prince was during these minutes most struck was that of Calderoni's
bestowal of his company for a view of the lions. If there was one thing
in the world the young man, at this juncture, clearly intended, it was
to be much more decent as a son-in-law than lots of fellows he could
think of had shown themselves in that character. He thought of the