difference, as it might be, of his lurking there by his own act and his own choice; the admission of which had indeed virtually been in his starting, on her entrance, as if even this were in its degree an interference.  That was what betrayed for her, practically, his fear of her fifty ideas, and what had begun, after a minute, to make her wish to repudiate or explain.  It was more wonderful than she could have told; it was for all the world as if she was succeeding with him beyond her intention.  She had, for these instants, the sense that he exaggerated, that the imputation of purpose had fairly risen too high in him.  She had begun, a year ago, by asking herself how she could make him think more of her; but what was it, after all, he was thinking now?  He kept his eyes on her telegram; he read it more than once, easy as it was, in spite of its conveyed deprecation, to understand; during which she found herself almost awestruck with yearning, almost on the point of marking somehow what she had marked in the garden at Fawns with Charlotte—­that she had truly come unarmed.  She didn’t bristle with intentions—­she scarce knew, as he at this juncture affected her, what had become of the only intention she had come with.  She had nothing but her old idea, the old one he knew; she hadn’t the ghost of another.  Presently in fact, when four or five minutes had elapsed, it was as if she positively, hadn’t so much even as that one.  He gave her back her paper, asking with it if there were anything in particular she wished him to do.

She stood there with her eyes on him, doubling the telegram together as if it had been a precious thing and yet all the while holding her breath.  Of a sudden, somehow, and quite as by the action of their merely having between them these few written words, an extraordinary fact came up.  He was with her as if he were hers, hers in a degree and on a scale, with an intensity and an intimacy, that were a new and a strange quantity, that were like the irruption of a tide loosening them where they had stuck and making them feel they floated.  What was it that, with the rush of this, just kept her from putting out her hands to him, from catching at him as, in the other time, with the superficial impetus he and Charlotte had privately conspired to impart, she had so often, her breath failing her, known the impulse to catch at her father?  She did, however, just yet, nothing inconsequent—­ though she couldn’t immediately have said what saved her; and by the time she had neatly folded her telegram she was doing something merely needful.  “I wanted you simply to know—­so that you mayn’t by accident miss them.  For it’s the last,” said Maggie.

“The last?”

“I take it as their good-bye.”  And she smiled as she could always smile.  “They come in state—­to take formal leave.  They do everything that’s proper.  Tomorrow,” she said, “they go to Southampton.”

“If they do everything that’s proper,” the Prince presently asked, “why don’t they at least come to dine?”