s him do it."

Her husband looked impressed. "Watches him?"

"For the first faint sign. I mean of his noticing. It doesn't, as I tell
you, come. But she's there for it to see. And I felt," she continued,
"HOW she's there; I caught her, as it were, in the fact. She couldn't
keep it from me--though she left her post on purpose--came home with
me to throw dust in my eyes. I took it all--her dust; but it was what
showed me." With which supreme lucidity she reached the door of her
room. "Luckily it showed me also how she has succeeded. Nothing--from
him--HAS come."

"You're so awfully sure?"

"Sure. Nothing WILL. Good-night," she said. "She'll die first."

BOOK SECOND: THE PRINCESS

PART FOURTH

XXV

It was not till many days had passed that the Princess began to accept
the idea of having done, a little, something she was not always doing,
or indeed that of having listened to any inward voice that spoke in a
new tone. Yet these instinctive postponements of reflection were the
fruit, positively, of recognitions and perceptions already active; of
the sense, above all, that she had made, at a particular hour, made
by the mere touch of her hand, a difference in the situation so long
present to her as practically unattackable. This situation had been
occupying, for months and months, the very centre of the garden of her
life, but it had reared itself there like some strange, tall tower
of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish
pagoda, a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and
figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that
tinkled, ever so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs. She had walked
round and round it--that was what she felt; she had carried on her
existence in the space left her for circulation, a space that sometimes
seemed ample and sometimes narrow: looking up, all the while, at the
fair structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high, but never
quite making out, as yet, where she might have entered had she wished.
She had not wished till now--such was the odd case; and what was
doubtless equally odd, besides, was that, though her raised eyes seemed
to distinguish places that must serve, from within, and especially far
aloft, as apertures and outlooks, no door appeared to give access from
her convenient garden level. The great decorated surface had remained
consistently impenetrable an