e'll scarcely do it--or you
scarcely will--by our cutting, your and my cutting, too loose."

"I see what you mean," Maggie mused.

He let her for a little to give her attention to it; after which, "Shall
I just quite, of a sudden," he asked, "propose him a journey?"

Maggie hesitated, but she brought forth the fruit of reflection. "It
would have the merit that Charlotte then would be with me--with me, I
mean, so much more. Also that I shouldn't, by choosing such a time for
going away, seem unconscious and ungrateful, seem not to respond,
seem in fact rather to wish to shake her off. I should respond, on the
contrary, very markedly--by being here alone with her for a month."

"And would you like to be here alone with her for a month?"

"I could do with it beautifully. Or we might even," she said quite
gaily, "go together down to Fawns."

"You could be so very content without me?" the Prince presently
inquired.

"Yes, my own dear--if you could be content for a while with father. That
would keep me up. I might, for the time," she went on, "go to stay there
with Charlotte; or, better still, she might come to Portland Place."

"Oho!" said the Prince with cheerful vagueness.

"I should feel, you see," she continued, "that the two of us were
showing the same sort of kindness."

Amerigo thought. "The two of us? Charlotte and I?"

Maggie again hesitated. "You and I, darling."

"I see, I see"--he promptly took it in. "And what reason shall I
give--give, I mean, your father?"

"For asking him to go off? Why, the very simplest--if you
conscientiously can. The desire," said Maggie, "to be agreeable to him.
Just that only."

Something in this reply made her husband again reflect.
"'Conscientiously?' Why shouldn't I conscientiously? It wouldn't, by
your own contention," he developed, "represent any surprise for him. I
must strike him sufficiently as, at the worst, the last person in the
world to wish to do anything to hurt him."

Ah, there it was again, for Maggie--the note already sounded, the note
of the felt need of not working harm! Why this precautionary view, she
asked herself afresh, when her father had complained, at the very least,
as little as herself? With their stillness together so perfect, what
had suggested so, around them, the attitude of sparing them? Her inner
vision fixed it once more, this attitude, saw it, in the others,
as vivid and concrete, extended it straight from her companion to
Charlotte