off in some darkness of space that would steep her in solitude and harass her with care.  The heart of the Princess swelled, accordingly, even in her abasement; she had kept in tune with the right, and something, certainly, something that might be like a rare flower snatched from an impossible ledge, would, and possibly soon, come of it for her.  The right, the right—­yes, it took this extraordinary form of her humbugging, as she had called it, to the end.  It was only a question of not, by a hair’s breadth, deflecting into the truth.  So, supremely, was she braced.  “You must take it from me that your anxiety rests quite on a misconception.  You must take it from me that I’ve never at any moment fancied I could suffer by you.”  And, marvellously, she kept it up—­not only kept it up, but improved on it.  “You must take it from me that I’ve never thought of you but as beautiful, wonderful and good.  Which is all, I think, that you can possibly ask.”

Charlotte held her a moment longer:  she needed—­not then to have appeared only tactless—­the last word.  “It’s much more, my dear, than I dreamed of asking.  I only wanted your denial.”

“Well then, you have it.”

“Upon your honour?”

“Upon my honour:” 

And she made a point even, our young woman, of not turning away.  Her grip of her shawl had loosened—­she had let it fall behind her; but she stood there for anything more and till the weight should be lifted.  With which she saw soon enough what more was to come.  She saw it in Charlotte’s face, and felt it make between them, in the air, a chill that completed the coldness of their conscious perjury.  “Will you kiss me on it then?”

She couldn’t say yes, but she didn’t say no; what availed her still, however, was to measure, in her passivity, how much too far Charlotte had come to retreat.  But there was something different also, something for which, while her cheek received the prodigious kiss, she had her opportunity—­the sight of the others, who, having risen from their cards to join the absent members of their party, had reached the open door at the end of the room and stopped short, evidently, in presence of the demonstration that awaited them.  Her husband and her father were in front, and Charlotte’s embrace of her—­which wasn’t to be distinguished, for them, either, she felt, from her embrace of Charlotte—­took on with their arrival a high publicity.

XXXVII

Her father had asked her, three days later, in an interval of calm, how she was affected, in the light of their reappearance and of their now perhaps richer fruition, by Dotty and Kitty, and by the once formidable Mrs. Rance; and the consequence of this inquiry had been, for the pair, just such another stroll together, away from the rest of the party and off into the park, as had asserted its need to them on the occasion of the previous visit of these anciently more agitating friends—­that of their long talk, on a sequestered