e great style in which she had kept
this up; later on, at the hour's end, when they had retraced their steps
to find Amerigo and Charlotte awaiting them at the house, she was able
to say to herself that, truly, she had put her plan through; even though
once more setting herself the difficult task of making their relation,
every minute of the time, not fall below the standard of that other
hour, in the treasured past, which hung there behind them like a framed
picture in a museum, a high watermark for the history of their old
fortune; the summer evening, in the park at Fawns, when, side by side
under the trees just as now, they had let their happy confidence lull
them with its most golden tone. There had been the possibility of a trap
for her, at present, in the very question of their taking up anew that
residence; wherefore she had not been the first to sound it, in spite of
the impression from him of his holding off to see what she would do. She
was saying to herself in secret: "CAN we again, in this form, migrate
there? Can I, for myself, undertake it? face all the intenser keeping-up
and stretching-out, indefinitely, impossibly, that our conditions in the
country, as we've established and accepted them, would stand for?"
She had positively lost herself in this inward doubt--so much she was
subsequently to remember; but remembering then too that her companion,
though perceptibly perhaps as if not to be eager, had broken the ice
very much as he had broken it in Eaton Square after the banquet to the
Castledeans.

Her mind had taken a long excursion, wandered far into the vision of
what a summer at Fawns, with Amerigo and Charlotte still more eminently
in presence against that higher sky, would bring forth. Wasn't her
father meanwhile only pretending to talk of it? just as she was, in a
manner, pretending to listen? He got off it, finally, at all events,
for the transition it couldn't well help thrusting out at him; it had
amounted exactly to an arrest of her private excursion by the sense that
he had begun to IMITATE--oh, as never yet!--the ancient tone of gold. It
had verily come from him at last, the question of whether she thought it
would be very good--but very good indeed--that he should leave England
for a series of weeks, on some pretext, with the Prince. Then it had
been that she was to know her husband's "menace" hadn't really dropped,
since she was face to face with the effect of it. Ah, the effect of it
had o