ed--not then to have
appeared only tactless--the last word. "It's much more, my dear, than I
dreamed of asking. I only wanted your denial."

"Well then, you have it."

"Upon your honour?"

"Upon my honour:"

And she made a point even, our young woman, of not turning away. Her
grip of her shawl had loosened--she had let it fall behind her; but she
stood there for anything more and till the weight should be lifted.
With which she saw soon enough what more was to come. She saw it in
Charlotte's face, and felt it make between them, in the air, a chill
that completed the coldness of their conscious perjury. "Will you kiss
me on it then?"

She couldn't say yes, but she didn't say no; what availed her still,
however, was to measure, in her passivity, how much too far Charlotte
had come to retreat. But there was something different also, something
for which, while her cheek received the prodigious kiss, she had her
opportunity--the sight of the others, who, having risen from their cards
to join the absent members of their party, had reached the open door
at the end of the room and stopped short, evidently, in presence of
the demonstration that awaited them. Her husband and her father were in
front, and Charlotte's embrace of her--which wasn't to be distinguished,
for them, either, she felt, from her embrace of Charlotte--took on with
their arrival a high publicity.

XXXVII

Her father had asked her, three days later, in an interval of calm, how
she was affected, in the light of their reappearance and of their now
perhaps richer fruition, by Dotty and Kitty, and by the once formidable
Mrs. Rance; and the consequence of this inquiry had been, for the pair,
just such another stroll together, away from the rest of the party and
off into the park, as had asserted its need to them on the occasion of
the previous visit of these anciently more agitating friends--that of
their long talk, on a sequestered bench beneath one of the great trees,
when the particular question had come up for them the then purblind
discussion of which, at their enjoyed leisure, Maggie had formed the
habit of regarding as the "first beginning" of their present situation.
The whirligig of time had thus brought round for them again, on their
finding themselves face to face while the others were gathering for tea
on the terrace, the same odd impulse quietly to "slope"--so Adam Verver
himself, as they went, familiarly express