of the kind of human furniture required, esthetically, by such a scene.  The fusion of their presence with the decorative elements, their contribution to the triumph of selection, was complete and admirable; though, to a lingering view, a view more penetrating than the occasion really demanded, they also might have figured as concrete attestations of a rare power of purchase.  There was much indeed in the tone in which Adam Verver spoke again, and who shall say where his thought stopped?  “Le compte y est.  You’ve got some good things.”

Maggie met it afresh—­“Ah, don’t they look well?” Their companions, at the sound of this, gave them, in a spacious intermission of slow talk, an attention, all of gravity, that was like an ampler submission to the general duty of magnificence; sitting as still, to be thus appraised, as a pair of effigies of the contemporary great on one of the platforms of Madame Tussaud.  “I’m so glad—­for your last look.”

With which, after Maggie—­quite in the air—­had said it, the note was struck indeed; the note of that strange accepted finality of relation, as from couple to couple, which almost escaped an awkwardness only by not attempting a gloss.  Yes, this was the wonder, that the occasion defied insistence precisely because of the vast quantities with which it dealt—­so that separation was on a scale beyond any compass of parting.  To do such an hour justice would have been in some degree to question its grounds—­ which was why they remained, in fine, the four of them, in the upper air, united in the firmest abstention from pressure.  There was no point, visibly, at which, face to face, either Amerigo or Charlotte had pressed; and how little she herself was in danger of doing so Maggie scarce needed to remember.  That her father wouldn’t, by the tip of a toe—­of that she was equally conscious:  the only thing was that, since he didn’t, she could but hold her breath for what he would do instead.  When, at the end of three minutes more, he had said, with an effect of suddenness, “Well, Mag—­and the Principino?” it was quite as if that were, by contrast, the hard, the truer voice.

She glanced at the clock.  “I ‘ordered’ him for half-past five—­ which hasn’t yet struck.  Trust him, my dear, not to fail you!”

“Oh, I don’t want him to fail me!” was Mr. Verver’s reply; yet uttered in so explicitly jocose a relation to the possibilities of failure that even when, just afterwards, he wandered in his impatience to one of the long windows and passed out to the balcony, she asked herself but for a few seconds if reality, should she follow him, would overtake or meet her there.  She followed him of necessity—­it came, absolutely, so near to his inviting her, by stepping off into temporary detachment, to give the others something of the chance that she and her husband had so fantastically discussed.  Beside him then, while they hung over the great dull place, clear and almost coloured now, coloured with the odd, sad, pictured,