be called,
while he measured again and again the stretch of polished floor. He
could have named to himself no pressing reason for seeing her at this
moment, and her not coming in, as the half-hour elapsed, became in fact
quite positively, however perversely, the circumstance that kept him on
the spot. Just there, he might have been feeling, just there he could
best take his note. This observation was certainly by itself meagre
amusement for a dreary little crisis; but his walk to and fro, and in
particular his repeated pause at one of the high front windows, gave
each of the ebbing minutes, none the less, after a time, a little more
of the quality of a quickened throb of the spirit. These throbs scarce
expressed, however, the impatience of desire, any more than they stood
for sharp disappointment: the series together resembled perhaps more
than anything else those fine waves of clearness through which, for
a watcher of the east, dawn at last trembles into rosy day. The
illumination indeed was all for the mind, the prospect revealed by it a
mere immensity of the world of thought; the material outlook was all the
while a different matter. The March afternoon, judged at the window,
had blundered back into autumn; it had been raining for hours, and the
colour of the rain, the colour of the air, of the mud, of the opposite
houses, of life altogether, in so grim a joke, so idiotic a masquerade,
was an unutterable dirty brown. There was at first even, for the
young man, no faint flush in the fact of the direction taken, while
he happened to look out, by a slow-jogging four-wheeled cab which,
awkwardly deflecting from the middle course, at the apparent instance
of a person within, began to make for the left-hand pavement and so at
last, under further instructions, floundered to a full stop before the
Prince's windows. The person within, alighting with an easier motion,
proved to be a lady who left the vehicle to wait and, putting up no
umbrella, quickly crossed the wet interval that separated her from
the house. She but flitted and disappeared; yet the Prince, from his
standpoint, had had time to recognise her, and the recognition kept him
for some minutes motionless.

Charlotte Stant, at such an hour, in a shabby four-wheeler and a
waterproof, Charlotte Stant turning up for him at the very climax of
his special inner vision, was an apparition charged with a congruity at
which he stared almost as if it had been a violence. The