eally a
little from anxiety--to Eaton Square. She was possessed of a latch-key,
rarely used: it had always irritated Adam--one of the few things that
did--to find servants standing up so inhumanly straight when they came
home, in the small hours, after parties. "So I had but to slip in, each
time, with my cab at the door, and make out for myself, without their
knowing it, that Maggie was still there. I came, I went--without their
so much as dreaming. What do they really suppose," she asked, "becomes
of one?--not so much sentimentally or morally, so to call it, and since
that doesn't matter; but even just physically, materially, as a mere
wandering woman: as a decent harmless wife, after all; as the best
stepmother, after all, that really ever was; or at the least simply as
a maitresse de maison not quite without a conscience. They must even in
their odd way," she declared, "have SOME idea."

"Oh, they've a great deal of idea," said the Prince. And nothing was
easier than to mention the quantity. "They think so much of us. They
think in particular so much of you."

"Ah, don't put it all on 'me'!" she smiled.

But he was putting it now where she had admirably prepared the place.
"It's a matter of your known character."

"Ah, thank you for 'known'!" she still smiled.

"It's a matter of your wonderful cleverness and wonderful charm. It's
a matter of what those things have done for you in the world--I mean in
THIS world and this place. You're a Personage for them--and Personages
do go and come."

"Oh no, my dear; there you're quite wrong." And she laughed now in the
happier light they had diffused. "That's exactly what Personages don't
do: they live in state and under constant consideration; they haven't
latch-keys, but drums and trumpets announce them; and when they go out
in growlers it makes a greater noise still. It's you, caro mio," she
said, "who, so far as that goes, are the Personage."

"Ah," he in turn protested, "don't put it all on me! What, at any rate,
when you get home," he added, "shall you say that you've been doing?"

"I shall say, beautifully, that I've been here."

"All day?"

"Yes--all day. Keeping you company in your solitude. How can we
understand anything," she went on, "without really seeing that this
is what they must like to think I do for you?--just as, quite as
comfortably, you do it for me. The thing is for us to learn to take them
as they are."

He considered this a while, in his r