. Before she was well aware, accordingly, she had echoed in
this intensity of thought Amerigo's last words. "You're the last person
in the world to wish to do anything to hurt him."

She heard herself, heard her tone, after she had spoken, and heard it
the more that, for a minute after, she felt her husband's eyes on her
face, very close, too close for her to see him. He was looking at her
because he was struck, and looking hard--though his answer, when it
came, was straight enough. "Why, isn't that just what we have been
talking about--that I've affected you as fairly studying his comfort and
his pleasure? He might show his sense of it," the Prince went on, "by
proposing to ME an excursion."

"And you would go with him?" Maggie immediately asked.

He hung fire but an instant. "Per Dio!"

She also had her pause, but she broke it--since gaiety was in the
air--with an intense smile. "You can say that safely, because the
proposal's one that, of his own motion, he won't make."

She couldn't have narrated afterwards--and in fact was at a loss to tell
herself--by what transition, what rather marked abruptness of change
in their personal relation, their drive came to its end with a kind of
interval established, almost confessed to, between them. She felt it in
the tone with which he repeated, after her, "'Safely'--?"

"Safely as regards being thrown with him perhaps after all, in such a
case, too long. He's a person to think you might easily feel yourself to
be. So it won't," Maggie said, "come from father. He's too modest."

Their eyes continued to meet on it, from corner to corner of the
brougham. "Oh your modesty, between you--!" But he still smiled for it.
"So that unless I insist--?"

"We shall simply go on as we are."

"Well, we're going on beautifully," he answered--though by no means
with the effect it would have had if their mute transaction, that of
attempted capture and achieved escape, had not taken place. As Maggie
said nothing, none the less, to gainsay his remark, it was open to him
to find himself the next moment conscious of still another idea. "I
wonder if it would do. I mean for me to break in."

"'To break in'--?"

"Between your father and his wife. But there would be a way," he
said--"we can make Charlotte ask him." And then as Maggie herself now
wondered, echoing it again: "We can suggest to her to suggest to him
that he shall let me take him off."

"Oh!" said Maggie.

"Then if he asks her