isely, was doubtless why she had learned to wait, as the weeks
passed by, with a fair, or rather indeed with an excessive, imitation
of resumed serenity. There had been no prompt sequel to the Prince's
equivocal light, and that made for patience; yet she was none the less
to have to admit, after delay, that the bread he had cast on the
waters had come home, and that she should thus be justified of her old
apprehension. The consequence of this, in turn, was a renewed pang in
presence of his remembered ingenuity. To be ingenious with HER--what
DIDN'T, what mightn't that mean, when she had so absolutely never, at
any point of contact with him, put him, by as much as the value of a
penny, to the expense of sparing, doubting, fearing her, of having
in any way whatever to reckon with her? The ingenuity had been in his
simply speaking of their use of Charlotte as if it were common to them
in an equal degree, and his triumph, on the occasion, had been just in
the simplicity. She couldn't--and he knew it--say what was true: "Oh,
you 'use' her, and I use her, if you will, yes; but we use her ever
so differently and separately--not at all in the same way or degree.
There's nobody we really use together but ourselves, don't you see?--by
which I mean that where our interests are the same I can so beautifully,
so exquisitely serve you for everything, and you can so beautifully, so
exquisitely serve me. The only person either of us needs is the other
of us; so why, as a matter of course, in such a case as this, drag in
Charlotte?"

She couldn't so challenge him, because it would have been--and there she
was paralysed--the NOTE. It would have translated itself on the spot,
for his ear, into jealousy; and, from reverberation to repercussion,
would have reached her father's exactly in the form of a cry piercing
the stillness of peaceful sleep. It had been for many days almost as
difficult for her to catch a quiet twenty minutes with her father as
it had formerly been easy; there had been in fact, of old--the time,
so strangely, seemed already far away--an inevitability in her longer
passages with him, a sort of domesticated beauty in the calculability,
round about them, of everything. But at present Charlotte was almost
always there when Amerigo brought her to Eaton Square, where Amerigo
was constantly bringing her; and Amerigo was almost always there when
Charlotte brought her husband to Portland Place, where Charlotte was
constantly br