“You mean to say really that you’re going to stick here?” And then before Maggie could answer:  “What on earth will you do with your evenings?”

Maggie waited a moment—­Maggie could still tentatively smile.  “When people learn we’re here—­and of course the papers will be full of it!—­they’ll flock back in their hundreds, from wherever they are, to catch us.  You see you and the Colonel have yourselves done it.  As for our evenings, they won’t, I dare say, be particularly different from anything else that’s ours.  They won’t be different from our mornings or our afternoons—­except perhaps that you two dears will sometimes help us to get through them.  I’ve offered to go anywhere,” she added; “to take a house if he will.  But this—­just this and nothing else—­is Amerigo’s idea.  He gave it yesterday” she went on, “a name that, as, he said, described and fitted it.  So you see”—­and the Princess indulged again in her smile that didn’t play, but that only, as might have been said, worked—­“so you see there’s a method in our madness.”

It drew Mrs. Assingham’s wonder.  “And what then is the name?”

“’The reduction to its simplest expression of what we are doing’—­that’s what he called it.  Therefore as we’re doing nothing, we’re doing it in the most aggravated way—­which is the way he desires.”  With which Maggie further said:  “Of course I understand.”

“So do I!” her visitor after a moment breathed.  “You’ve had to vacate the house—­that was inevitable.  But at least here he doesn’t funk.”

Our young woman accepted the expression.  “He doesn’t funk.”

It only, however, half contented Fanny, who thoughtfully raised her eyebrows.  “He’s prodigious; but what is there—­as you’ve ‘fixed’ it—­to dodge?  Unless,” she pursued, “it’s her getting near him; it’s—­if you’ll pardon my vulgarity—­her getting at him.  That,” she suggested, “may count with him.”

But it found the Princess prepared.  “She can get near him here.  She can get ‘at’ him.  She can come up.”

“Can she?” Fanny Assingham questioned.

“Can’t she?” Maggie returned.

Their eyes, for a minute, intimately met on it; after which the elder woman said:  “I mean for seeing him alone.”

“So do I,” said the Princess.

At which Fanny, for her reasons, couldn’t help smiling.  “Oh, if it’s for that he’s staying—!”

“He’s staying—­I’ve made it out—­to take anything that comes or calls upon him.  To take,” Maggie went on, “even that.”  Then she put it as she had at last put it to herself.  “He’s staying for high decency.”

“Decency?” Mrs. Assingham gravely echoed.

“Decency.  If she should try—!”

“Well—?” Mrs. Assingham urged.

“Well, I hope—!”

“Hope he’ll see her?”