"I'll look after her."
"So it's all right."
"It's all right," said Mrs. Assingham.
"Then why are you troubled?"
It pulled her up--but only for a minute. "I'm not--any more than
you."
The Prince's dark blue eyes were of the finest, and, on occasion,
precisely, resembled nothing so much as the high windows of a
Roman palace, of an historic front by one of the great old
designers, thrown open on a feast-day to the golden air. His look
itself, at such times, suggested an image--that of some very
noble personage who, expected, acclaimed by the crowd in the
street and with old precious stuffs falling over the sill for his
support, had gaily and gallantly come to show himself: always
moreover less in his own interest than in that of spectators and
subjects whose need to admire, even to gape, was periodically to
be considered. The young man's expression became, after this
fashion, something vivid and concrete--a beautiful personal
presence, that of a prince in very truth, a ruler, warrior,
patron, lighting up brave architecture and diffusing the sense of
a function. It had been happily said of his face that the figure
thus appearing in the great frame was the ghost of some proudest
ancestor. Whoever the ancestor now, at all events, the Prince
was, for Mrs. Assingham's benefit, in view of the people. He
seemed, leaning on crimson damask, to take in the bright day. He
looked younger than his years; he was beautiful, innocent, vague.
"Oh, well, I'M not!" he rang out clear.
"I should like to SEE you, sir!" she said. "For you wouldn't have
a shadow of excuse." He showed how he agreed that he would have
been at a loss for one, and the fact of their serenity was thus
made as important as if some danger of its opposite had directly
menaced them. The only thing was that if the evidence of their
cheer was so established Mrs. Assingham had a little to explain
her original manner, and she came to this before they dropped the
question. "My first impulse is always to behave, about
everything, as if I feared complications. But I don't fear them--
I really like them. They're quite my element."
He deferred, for her, to this account of herself. "But still,"
he said, "if we're not in the presence of a complication."
She hesitated. "A handsome, clever, odd girl staying with one is
always a complication."
The young man weighed it almost as if the question were new to
him. "And will she stay very long?"
His friend gave a laugh. "How in the world can I know? I've
scarcely asked her."
"Ah yes. You can't."
But something in the tone of it amused her afresh. "Do you think
you could?"
"I?" he wondered.
"Do you think you could get it out of her for me--the probable
length of her stay?"
He rose bravely enough to the occasion and the challenge. "I
daresay, if you were to give me the chance."
"Here it is then for you," she answered; for she had heard,
within the minute, the stop of a cab at her door. "She's back."