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By Root 7222 0

of it somehow marked a date. He was on her mind, he was even in a manner on her hands – as a distinct thing, that is, from being, where he had always been, merely deep in her heart and in her life; too deep down, as it were, to be disengaged, contrasted or opposed, in short objectively presented. But time finally had done it; their relation was altered: he again saw the difference lighted for her. This marked it to himself – and it wasn’t a question simply of a Mrs Rance the more or the less. For Maggie too at a stroke, almost beneficently, their visitor had, from being an inconvenience, become a sign. They had made vacant by their marriage his immediate foreground, his personal precinct – they being the Princess and the Prince. They had made room in it for others – so others had become aware. He became aware himself, for that matter, during the minute Maggie stood there before speaking; and with the sense moreover of what he saw her see he had the sense of what she saw him. This last, it may be added, would have been his intensest perception hadn’t there the next instant been more for him in Fanny Assingham. Her face couldn’t keep it from him; she had seen, on top of everything, in her quick way, what they both were seeing.

3

So much mute communication was doubtless all this time marvellous, and we may confess to having perhaps read into the scene prematurely a critical character that took longer to develop. Yet the quiet hour of reunion enjoyed that afternoon by the father and the daughter did really little else than deal with the elements definitely presented to each in the vibration produced by the return of the church-goers. Nothing allusive, nothing at all insistent, passed between them either before or immediately after luncheon – except indeed so far as their failure soon again to meet might be itself an accident charged with reference. The hour or two after luncheon – and on Sundays with especial rigour, for one of the domestic reasons of which it belonged to Maggie quite multitudinously to take account – were habitually spent by the Princess with her little boy, in whose apartment she either frequently found her father already established or was sooner or later joined by him. His visit to his grandson, at some hour or other, held its place, in his day, against all interventions, and this without counting his grandson’s visits to him, scarcely less ordered and timed, and the odd bits, as he called them, that they picked up together when they could – communions snatched, for the most part, on the terrace, in the gardens or the park, while the Principino, with much pomp and circumstance of perambulator, parasol, fine lace over-veiling and incorruptible female attendance, took the air. In the private apartments, which, occupying in the great house the larger part of a wing of their own, were not much more easily accessible than if the place had been a royal palace and the small child an heir-apparent – in the nursery of nurseries the talk, at these instituted times, was always so prevailingly with or about the master of the scene that other interests and other topics had fairly learned to avoid the slighting and inadequate notice there taken of them. They came in at the best but as involved in the little boy’s future, his past, or his comprehensive present, never getting so much as a chance to plead their own merits or to complain of being neglected. Nothing perhaps in truth had done more than this united participation to confirm in the elder parties that sense of a life not only uninterrupted but more deeply associated, more largely combined, of which, on Adam Verver’s behalf, we have made some mention. It was of course an old story and a familiar idea that a beautiful baby could take its place as a new link between a wife and a husband, but Maggie and her father had, with every ingenuity, converted the precious creature into a link between a mamma and a grandpapa. The Principino, for a chance spectator of this process, might have become, by an untoward stroke, a hapless half-orphan, with the place of immediate