On him too, however, something had descended; as to which this exactly gave him his chance.  “Ah, but I shall see you—!  No?” he said, coming nearer.

She had, with her hand still on the knob, her back against the door, so that her retreat, under his approach must be less than a step, and yet she couldn’t for her life, with the other hand, have pushed him away.  He was so near now that she could touch him, taste him, smell him, kiss him, hold him; he almost pressed upon her, and the warmth of his face—­frowning, smiling, she mightn’t know which; only beautiful and strange—­was bent upon her with the largeness with which objects loom in dreams.  She closed her eyes to it, and so, the next instant, against her purpose, she had put out her hand, which had met his own and which he held.  Then it was that, from behind her closed eyes, the right word came.  “Wait!” It was the word of his own distress and entreaty, the word for both of them, all they had left, their plank now on the great sea.  Their hands were locked, and thus she said it again.  “Wait.  Wait.”  She kept her eyes shut, but her hand, she knew, helped her meaning—­which after a minute she was aware his own had absorbed.  He let her go—­he turned away with this message, and when she saw him again his back was presented, as he had left her, and his face staring out of the window.  She had saved herself and she got off.

XLII

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