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By Root 7063 0

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-water-mark for the history of their old fortune; the summer evening in the park of 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 hadn’t 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 occupied all the rest of their walk, had stayed out with them and come home with them, besides making it impossible that they shouldn’t presently feign to recollect how rejoining the child had been their original purpose. Maggie’s uneffaced note was that it had, at the end of five minutes more, driven them to that endeavour as to a refuge, and caused them afterwards to rejoice, as well, that the boy’s irrepressibly importunate company, in due course secured and enjoyed, with the extension imparted by his governess, a person expectant of consideration, constituted a cover for any awkwardness. For that was what it had all come to, that the dear man had spoken to her to try her – quite as he had been spoken to himself by Charlotte with the same fine idea. The Princess took it in on the spot, firmly grasping it; she heard them together, her father and his wife, dealing with the queer case. ‘The Prince tells me that Maggie has a plan for your taking some foreign journey with him, and as he likes to do everything she wants he has suggested my speaking to you for it as the thing most likely to make you consent. So I do speak – see? – being always so eager myself, as you know, to meet Maggie’s wishes. I speak, but without quite understanding this time what she has in her head. Why should she of a sudden at this particular moment desire to ship you off together and remain here alone with me? The compliment’s all to me, I admit, and you must decide quite as you like. The Prince is quite ready, evidently, to do his part – but you’ll have it out with him. That is you’ll have it out with her.’ Something of that kind was what, in her mind’s ear, Maggie heard – and this, after his waiting for her to appeal to him directly, was her father’s invitation to her to have it out. Well,