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By Root 17436 0

’t betray something of her danger. Maggie had a day of still waiting after allowing him time to learn how unreservedly she had lied for him – of waiting as for the light of she scarce knew what slow-shining reflexion of this knowledge in her personal attitude. What retarded evolution, she asked herself in these hours, mightn’t poor Charlotte all unwittingly have precipitated? She was thus poor Charlotte again for Maggie even while Maggie’s own head was bowed, and the reason for this kept coming back to our young woman in the conception of what would secretly have passed. She saw her, face to face with the Prince, take from him the chill of his stiffest admonition, with the possibilities of deeper difficulty that it represented for each. She heard her ask, irritated and sombre, what tone in God’s name – since her bravery didn’t suit him – she was then to adopt; and by way of a fantastic flight of divination she heard Amerigo reply, in a voice of which every fine note, familiar and admirable, came home to her, that one must really manage such prudences a little for one’s self. It was positive in the Princess that for this she breathed Charlotte’s cold air – turned away from him in it with her, turned with her, in growing compassion, this way and that, hovered behind her while she felt her ask herself where then she should rest. Marvellous the manner in which, under such imaginations, Maggie thus circled and lingered – quite as if she were, materially, following her unseen, counting every step she helplessly wasted, noting every hindrance that brought her to a pause.

A few days of this accordingly had wrought a change in that apprehension of the instant beatitude of triumph – of triumph magnanimous and serene – with which the upshot of the night-scene on the terrace had condemned our young woman to make terms. She had had, as we know, her vision of the gilt bars bent, of the door of the cage forced open from within and the creature imprisoned roaming at large – a movement on the creature’s part that was to have even for the short interval its impressive beauty, but of which the limit, and in yet another direction, had loomed straight into view during her last talk under the great trees with her father. It was when she saw his wife’s face ruefully attached to the quarter to which in the course of their session he had so significantly addressed his own – it was then that Maggie could watch for its turning pale, it was then she seemed to know what she had meant by thinking of her, in the shadow of his most ominous reference, as ‘doomed’. If, as I say, her attention now, day after day, so circled and hovered, it found itself arrested for certain passages during which she absolutely looked with Charlotte’s grave eyes. What she unfailingly made out through them was the figure of a little quiet gentleman who mostly wore, as he moved alone across the field of vision, a straw hat, a white waistcoat and a blue necktie, keeping a cigar in his teeth and his hands in his pockets, and who oftener than not presented a somewhat meditative back while he slowly measured the perspectives of the park and broodingly counted (it might have appeared) his steps. There were hours of intensity for a week or two when it was for all the world as if she had guardedly tracked her stepmother, in the great house, from room to room and from window to window, only to see her, here and there and everywhere, try her uneasy outlook, question her issue and her fate. Something indubitably had come up for her that had never come up before; it represented a new complication and had begotten a new anxiety – things these that she carried about with her done up in the napkin of her lover’s accepted rebuke while she vainly hunted for some corner where she might put them safely down. The disguised solemnity, the prolonged futility of her search might have been grotesque to a more ironic eye; but Maggie’s provision of irony, which we have taken for naturally small, had never been so scant as now, and there were moments while she watched with her, thus unseen, when the mere effect of being near her was to feel her own heart in her throat, was to be almost moved to saying to her: