it; never so much as to-night had the Prince felt this.  He would have been uncomfortable, as these quiet expressions passed, had the case not been guaranteed for him by the intensity of his accord with Charlotte.  It was impossible that he should not now and again meet Charlotte’s eyes, as it was also visible that she too now and again met her husband’s.  For her as well, in all his pulses, he felt the conveyed impression.  It put them, it kept them together, through the vain show of their separation, made the two other faces, made the whole lapse of the evening, the people, the lights, the flowers, the pretended talk, the exquisite music, a mystic golden bridge between them, strongly swaying and sometimes almost vertiginous, for that intimacy of which the sovereign law would be the vigilance of “care,” would be never rashly to forget and never consciously to wound.

XX

The main interest of these hours for us, however, will have been in the way the Prince continued to know, during a particular succession of others, separated from the evening in Eaton Square by a short interval, a certain persistent aftertaste.  This was the lingering savour of a cup presented to him by Fanny Assingham’s hand after dinner, while the clustered quartette kept their ranged companions, in the music-room, moved if one would, but conveniently motionless.  Mrs. Assingham contrived, after a couple of pieces, to convey to her friend that, for her part, she was moved—­by the genius of Brahms—­beyond what she could bear; so that, without apparent deliberation, she had presently floated away, at the young man’s side, to such a distance as permitted them to converse without the effect of disdain.  It was the twenty minutes enjoyed with her, during the rest of the concert, in the less associated electric glare of one of the empty rooms—­it was their achieved and, as he would have said, successful, most pleasantly successful, talk on one of the sequestered sofas, it was this that was substantially to underlie his consciousness of the later occasion.  The later occasion, then mere matter of discussion, had formed her ground for desiring—­in a light undertone into which his quick ear read indeed some nervousness—­ these independent words with him:  she had sounded, covertly but distinctly, by the time they were seated together, the great question of what it might involve.  It had come out for him before anything else, and so abruptly that this almost needed an explanation.  Then the abruptness itself had appeared to explain—­ which had introduced, in turn, a slight awkwardness.  “Do you know that they’re not, after all, going to Matcham; so that, if they don’t—­if, at least, Maggie doesn’t—­you won’t, I suppose, go by yourself?” It was, as I say, at Matcham, where the event had placed him, it was at Matcham during the Easter days, that it most befell him, oddly enough, to live over, inwardly, for its wealth of special significance, this passage by which the event had been really a good deal determined.