“It only wants a moon, a mandolin, and a little danger, to be a serenade.”

“Ah, then,” she lightly called down, “let it at least have this!” With which she detached a rich white rosebud from its company with another in the front of her dress and flung it down to him.  He caught it in its fall, fixing her again after she had watched him place it in his buttonhole.  “Come down quickly!” he said in an Italian not loud but deep.

“Vengo, vengo!” she as clearly, but more lightly, tossed out; and she had left him the next minute to wait for her.

He came along the terrace again, with pauses during which his eyes rested, as they had already often done, on the brave darker wash of far-away watercolour that represented the most distant of the cathedral towns.  This place, with its great church and its high accessibility, its towers that distinguishably signalled, its English history, its appealing type, its acknowledged interest, this place had sounded its name to him half the night through, and its name had become but another name, the pronounceable and convenient one, for that supreme sense of things which now throbbed within him.  He had kept saying to himself “Gloucester, Gloucester, Gloucester,” quite as if the sharpest meaning of all the years just passed were intensely expressed in it.  That meaning was really that his situation remained quite sublimely consistent with itself, and that they absolutely, he and Charlotte, stood there together in the very lustre of this truth.  Every present circumstance helped to proclaim it; it was blown into their faces as by the lips of the morning.  He knew why, from the first of his marriage, he had tried with such patience for such conformity; he knew why he had given up so much and bored himself so much; he knew why he, at any rate, had gone in, on the basis of all forms, on the basis of his having, in a manner, sold himself, for a situation nette.  It had all been just in order that his—­well, what on earth should he call it but his freedom?—­should at present be as perfect and rounded and lustrous as some huge precious pearl.  He hadn’t struggled nor snatched; he was taking but what had been given him; the pearl dropped itself, with its exquisite quality and rarity, straight into his hand.  Here, precisely, it was, incarnate; its size and its value grew as Mrs. Verver appeared, afar off, in one of the smaller doorways.  She came toward him in silence, while he moved to meet her; the great scale of this particular front, at Matcham, multiplied thus, in the golden morning, the stages of their meeting and the successions of their consciousness.  It wasn’t till she had come quite close that he produced for her his “Gloucester, Gloucester, Gloucester,” and his “Look at it over there!”

She knew just where to look.  “Yes—­isn’t it one of the best?  There are cloisters or towers or some thing.”  And her eyes, which, though her lips smiled, were almost grave with their depths of acceptance; came back to him.  “Or the tomb of some old king.”