“We must see the old king; we must ‘do’ the cathedral,” he said; “we must know all about it.  If we could but take,” he exhaled, “the full opportunity!” And then while, for all they seemed to give him, he sounded again her eyes:  “I feel the day like a great gold cup that we must somehow drain together.”

“I feel it, as you always make me feel everything, just as you do; so that I know ten miles off how you feel!  But do you remember,” she asked, “apropos of great gold cups, the beautiful one, the real one, that I offered you so long ago and that you wouldn’t have?  Just before your marriage”—­she brought it back to him:  “the gilded crystal bowl in the little Bloomsbury shop.”

“Oh yes!”—­but it took, with a slight surprise on the ’Prince’s part, some small recollecting.  “The treacherous cracked thing you wanted to palm off on me, and the little swindling Jew who understood Italian and who backed you up!  But I feel this an occasion,” he immediately added, “and I hope you don’t mean,” he smiled, “that as an occasion it’s also cracked.”

They spoke, naturally, more low than loud, overlooked as they were, though at a respectful distance, by tiers of windows; but it made each find in the other’s voice a taste as of something slowly and deeply absorbed.  “Don’t you think too much of ‘cracks,’ and aren’t you too afraid of them?  I risk the cracks,” said Charlotte, “and I’ve often recalled the bowl and the little swindling Jew, wondering if they’ve parted company.  He made,” she said, “a great impression on me.”

“Well, you also, no doubt, made a great impression on him, and I dare say that if you were to go back to him you’d find he has been keeping that treasure for you.  But as to cracks,” the Prince went on—­“what did you tell me the other day you prettily call them in English?-’rifts within the lute’?—­risk them as much as you like for yourself, but don’t risk them for me.”  He spoke it in all the gaiety of his just barely-tremulous serenity.  “I go, as you know, by my superstitions.  And that’s why,” he said, “I know where we are.  They’re every one, to-day, on our side.”

Resting on the parapet; toward the great view, she was silent a little, and he saw the next moment that her eyes were closed.  “I go but by one thing.”  Her hand was on the sun-warmed stone; so that, turned as they were away from the house, he put his own upon it and covered it.  “I go by you,” she said.  “I go by you.”

So they remained a moment, till he spoke again with a gesture that matched.  “What is really our great necessity, you know, is to go by my watch.  It’s already eleven”—­he had looked at the time; “so that if we stop here to luncheon what becomes of our afternoon?”

To this Charlotte’s eyes opened straight.  “There’s not the slightest need of our stopping here to luncheon.  Don’t you see,” she asked, “how I’m ready?” He had taken it in, but there was always more and more of her.  “You mean you’ve arranged—?”