or four, had slipped away from her—­which it was vain now, wasn’t it? to try to appear to clutch or to pick up.  That consciousness in fact had a pang, and she balanced, intensely, for the lingering moment, almost with a terror of her endless power of surrender.  He had only to press, really, for her to yield inch by inch, and she fairly knew at present, while she looked at him through her cloud, that the confession of this precious secret sat there for him to pluck.  The sensation, for the few seconds, was extraordinary; her weakness, her desire, so long as she was yet not saving herself, flowered in her face like a light or a darkness.  She sought for some word that would cover this up; she reverted to the question of tea, speaking as if they shouldn’t meet sooner.  “Then about five.  I count on you.”

On him too, however, something had descended; as to which this exactly gave him his chance.  “Ah, but I shall see you—!  No?” he said, coming nearer.

She had, with her hand still on the knob, her back against the door, so that her retreat, under his approach must be less than a step, and yet she couldn’t for her life, with the other hand, have pushed him away.  He was so near now that she could touch him, taste him, smell him, kiss him, hold him; he almost pressed upon her, and the warmth of his face—­frowning, smiling, she mightn’t know which; only beautiful and strange—­was bent upon her with the largeness with which objects loom in dreams.  She closed her eyes to it, and so, the next instant, against her purpose, she had put out her hand, which had met his own and which he held.  Then it was that, from behind her closed eyes, the right word came.  “Wait!” It was the word of his own distress and entreaty, the word for both of them, all they had left, their plank now on the great sea.  Their hands were locked, and thus she said it again.  “Wait.  Wait.”  She kept her eyes shut, but her hand, she knew, helped her meaning—­which after a minute she was aware his own had absorbed.  He let her go—­he turned away with this message, and when she saw him again his back was presented, as he had left her, and his face staring out of the window.  She had saved herself and she got off.

XLII

Later on, in the afternoon, before the others arrived, the form of their reunion was at least remarkable:  they might, in their great eastward drawing-room, have been comparing notes or nerves in apprehension of some stiff official visit.  Maggie’s mind, in its restlessness, even played a little with the prospect; the high cool room, with its afternoon shade, with its old tapestries uncovered, with the perfect polish of its wide floor reflecting the bowls of gathered flowers and the silver and linen of the prepared tea-table, drew from her a remark in which this whole effect was mirrored, as well as something else in the Prince’s movement while he slowly paced and turned.  “We’re distinctly bourgeois!” she a trifle grimly threw