Later on, in the afternoon, before the others arrived, the form
of their reunion was at least remarkable: they might, in their
great eastward drawing-room, have been comparing notes or nerves
in apprehension of some stiff official visit. Maggie's mind, in
its restlessness, even played a little with the prospect; the
high cool room, with its afternoon shade, with its old tapestries
uncovered, with the perfect polish of its wide floor reflecting
the bowls of gathered flowers and the silver and linen of the
prepared tea-table, drew from her a remark in which this whole
effect was mirrored, as well as something else in the Prince's
movement while he slowly paced and turned. "We're distinctly
bourgeois!" she a trifle grimly threw off, as an echo of their
old community; though to a spectator sufficiently detached they
might have been quite the privileged pair they were reputed,
granted only they were taken as awaiting the visit of Royalty.
They might have been ready, on the word passed up in advance, to
repair together to the foot of the staircase--the Prince somewhat
in front, advancing indeed to the open doors and even going down,
for all his princedom, to meet, on the stopping of the chariot,
the august emergence. The time was stale, it was to be admitted,
for incidents of magnitude; the September hush was in full
possession, at the end of the dull day, and a couple of the long
windows stood open to the balcony that overhung the desolation--
the balcony from which Maggie, in the springtime, had seen
Amerigo and Charlotte look down together at the hour of her
return from the Regent's Park, near by, with her father, the
Principino and Miss Bogle. Amerigo now again, in his punctual
impatience, went out a couple of times and stood there; after
which, as to report that nothing was in sight, he returned to the
room with frankly nothing else to do. The Princess pretended to
read; he looked at her as he passed; there hovered in her own
sense the thought of other occasions when she had cheated
appearances of agitation with a book. At last she felt him
standing before her, and then she raised her eyes.
"Do you remember how, this morning, when you told me of this
event, I asked you if there were anything particular you wished
me to do? You spoke of my being at home, but that was a matter of
course. You spoke of something else," he went on, while she sat
with her book on her knee and her raised eyes; "something that
makes me almost wish it may happen. You spoke," he said, "of the
possibility of my seeing her alone. Do you know, if that comes,"
he asked, "the use I shall make of it?" And then as she waited:
"The use is all before me."
"Ah, it's your own business now!" said his wife. But it had made
her rise.
"I shall make it my own," he answered. "I shall tell her I lied
to her."
"Ah no!" she returned.
"And I shall tell her you did."