closer quarters. He looked at her across the interval,
and, still in her seat, weighing his charge, she felt her whole view
of everything flare up. Wasn't it simply what had been written in the
Prince's own face BENEATH what he was saying?--didn't it correspond with
the mocking presence there that she had had her troubled glimpse of?
Wasn't, in fine, the pledge that they would "manage in their own way"
the thing he had been feeling for his chance to invite her to take from
him? Her husband's tone somehow fitted Amerigo's look--the one that had,
for her, so strangely, peeped, from behind, over the shoulder of the one
in front. She had not then read it--but wasn't she reading it when she
now saw in it his surmise that she was perhaps to be squared? She wasn't
to be squared, and while she heard her companion call across to her
"Well, what's the matter?" she also took time to remind herself that
she had decided she couldn't be frightened. The "matter"?--why, it was
sufficiently the matter, with all this, that she felt a little sick. For
it was not the Prince that she had been prepared to regard as primarily
the shaky one. Shakiness in Charlotte she had, at the most, perhaps
postulated--it would be, she somehow felt, more easy to deal with.
Therefore if HE had come so far it was a different pair of sleeves.
There was nothing to choose between them. It made her so helpless that,
as the time passed without her alighting, the Colonel came back
and fairly drew her forth; after which, on the pavement, under the
street-lamp, their very silence might have been the mark of something
grave--their silence eked out for her by his giving her his arm and
their then crawling up their steps quite mildly and unitedly together,
like some old Darby and Joan who have had a disappointment. It almost
resembled a return from a funeral--unless indeed it resembled more the
hushed approach to a house of mourning. What indeed had she come home
for but to bury, as decently as possible, her mistake?

XVII

It appeared thus that they might enjoy together extraordinary freedom,
the two friends, from the moment they should understand their position
aright. With the Prince himself, from an early stage, not unnaturally,
Charlotte had made a great point of their so understanding it; she had
found frequent occasion to describe to him this necessity, and, her
resignation tempered, or her intelligence at least quickened, by
irr