vain reverberations.  The double door of the house stood open to an effect of hazy autumn sunshine, a wonderful, windless, waiting, golden hour, under the influence of which Adam Verver met his genial friend as she came to drop into the post-box with her own hand a thick sheaf of letters.  They presently thereafter left the house together and drew out half-an-hour on the terrace in a manner they were to revert to in thought, later on, as that of persons who really had been taking leave of each other at a parting of the ways.  He traced his impression, on coming to consider, back to a mere three words she had begun by using about Charlotte Stant.  She simply “cleared them out”—­those had been the three words, thrown off in reference to the general golden peace that the Kentish October had gradually ushered in, the “halcyon” days the full beauty of which had appeared to shine out for them after Charlotte’s arrival.  For it was during these days that Mrs. Rance and the Miss Lutches had been observed to be gathering themselves for departure, and it was with that difference made that the sense of the whole situation showed most fair—­the sense of how right they had been to engage for so ample a residence, and of all the pleasure so fruity an autumn there could hold in its lap.  This was what had occurred, that their lesson had been learned; and what Mrs. Assingham had dwelt upon was that without Charlotte it would have been learned but half.  It would certainly not have been taught by Mrs. Rance and the Miss Lutches if these ladies had remained with them as long as at one time seemed probable.  Charlotte’s light intervention had thus become a cause, operating covertly but none the less actively, and Fanny Assingham’s speech, which she had followed up a little, echoed within him, fairly to startle him, as the indication of something irresistible.  He could see now how this superior force had worked, and he fairly liked to recover the sight—­little harm as he dreamed of doing, little ill as he dreamed of wishing, the three ladies, whom he had after all entertained for a stiffish series of days.  She had been so vague and quiet about it, wonderful Charlotte, that he hadn’t known what was happening—­ happening, that is, as a result of her influence.  “Their fires, as they felt her, turned to smoke,” Mrs. Assingham remarked; which he was to reflect on indeed even while they strolled.  He had retained, since his long talk with Maggie—­the talk that had settled the matter of his own direct invitation to her friend—­an odd little taste, as he would have described it, for hearing things said about this young woman, hearing, so to speak, what could be said about her:  almost as it her portrait, by some eminent hand, were going on, so that he watched it grow under the multiplication of touches.  Mrs. Assingham, it struck him, applied two or three of the finest in their discussion of their young friend—­so different a figure now from that early playmate of