The expression of her face was strange—­but since when had a woman’s at moments of supreme surrender not a right to be?  He took it in with his own long look and his grateful silence—­so that nothing more, for some instants, passed between them.  Their understanding sealed itself—­he already felt that she had made him right.  But he was in presence too of the fact that Maggie had made her so; and always, therefore, without Maggie, where, in fine, would he be?  She united them, brought them together as with the click of a silver spring, and, on the spot, with the vision of it, his eyes filled, Charlotte facing him meanwhile with her expression made still stranger by the blur of his gratitude.  Through it all, however, he smiled.  “What my child does for me—!”

Through it all as well, that is still through the blur, he saw Charlotte, rather than heard her, reply.  She held her paper wide open, but her eyes were all for his.  “It isn’t Maggie.  It’s the Prince.”

“I say!”—­he gaily rang out.  “Then it’s best of all.”

“It’s enough.”

“Thank you for thinking so!” To which he added “It’s enough for our question, but it isn’t—­is it? quite enough for our breakfast?  Dejeunons.”

She stood there, however, in spite of this appeal, her document always before them.  “Don’t you want to read it?”

He thought.  “Not if it satisfies you.  I don’t require it.”

But she gave him, as for her conscience, another chance.  “You can if you like.”

He hesitated afresh, but as for amiability, not for curiosity.  “Is it funny?”

Thus, finally, she again dropped her eyes on it, drawing in her lips a little.  “No—­I call it grave.”

“Ah, then, I don’t want it.”

“Very grave,” said Charlotte Stant.

“Well, what did I tell you of him?” he asked, rejoicing, as they started:  a question for all answer to which, before she took his arm, the girl thrust her paper, crumpled, into the pocket of her coat.

PART THIRD

XIV

Charlotte, half way up the “monumental” staircase, had begun by waiting alone—­waiting to be rejoined by her companion, who had gone down all the way, as in common kindness bound, and who, his duty performed, would know where to find her.  She was meanwhile, though extremely apparent, not perhaps absolutely advertised; but she would not have cared if she had been—­so little was it, by this time, her first occasion of facing society with a consciousness materially, with a confidence quite splendidly, enriched.  For a couple of years now she had known as never before what it was to look “well”—­to look, that is, as well as she had always felt, from far back, that, in certain conditions, she might.  On such an evening as this, that of a great official party in the full flush of the London spring-time, the conditions affected her, her nerves, her senses, her imagination,