minute, she had advanced to our friends with her
cap-streamers flying and her smile of announcement as ample as her
broad white apron. She raised aloft a telegraphic message and, as she
delivered it, sociably discriminated. "Cette fois-ci pour madame!"--with
which she as genially retreated, leaving Charlotte in possession.
Charlotte, taking it, held it at first unopened. Her eyes had come back
to her companion, who had immediately and triumphantly greeted it. "Ah,
there you are!"

She broke the envelope then in silence, and for a minute, as with the
message he himself had put before her, studied its contents without
a sign. He watched her without a question, and at last she looked up.
"I'll give you," she simply said, "what you ask."

The expression of her face was strange--but since when had a woman's at
moments of supreme surrender not a right to be? He took it in with his
own long look and his grateful silence--so that nothing more, for some
instants, passed between them. Their understanding sealed itself--he
already felt that she had made him right. But he was in presence too
of the fact that Maggie had made HER so; and always, therefore, without
Maggie, where, in fine, would he be? She united them, brought them
together as with the click of a silver spring, and, on the spot, with
the vision of it, his eyes filled, Charlotte facing him meanwhile with
her expression made still stranger by the blur of his gratitude. Through
it all, however, he smiled. "What my child does for me--!"

Through it all as well, that is still through the blur, he saw
Charlotte, rather than heard her, reply. She held her paper wide open,
but her eyes were all for his. "It isn't Maggie. It's the Prince."

"I SAY!"--he gaily rang out. "Then it's best of all."

"It's enough."

"Thank you for thinking so!" To which he added "It's enough for
our question, but it isn't--is it? quite enough for our breakfast?
Dejeunons."

She stood there, however, in spite of this appeal, her document always
before them. "Don't you want to read it?"

He thought. "Not if it satisfies you. I don't require it."

But she gave him, as for her conscience, another chance. "You can if you
like."

He hesitated afresh, but as for amiability, not for curiosity. "Is it
funny?"

Thus, finally, she again dropped her eyes on it, drawing in her lips a
little. "No--I call it grave."

"Ah, then, I don't want it."

"Very grave," said Charlotte Stant.

"Well, what