“Well,” said Adam Verver, “what kind of a warning will he have found in that?  To what catastrophe will he have observed such a disposition in her to lead?”

“Just to this one!” With which she struck him as rising straighter and clearer before him than she had done even yet.

“Our little question itself?” Her appearance had in fact, at the moment, such an effect on him that he could answer but in marvelling mildness.  “Hadn’t we better wait a while till we call it a catastrophe?”

Her rejoinder to this was to wait—­though by no means as long as he meant.  When at the end of her minute she spoke, however, it was mildly too.  “What would you like, dear friend, to wait for?” It lingered between them in the air, this demand, and they exchanged for the time a look which might have made each of them seem to have been watching in the other the signs of its overt irony.  These were indeed immediately so visible in Mr. Verver’s face that, as if a little ashamed of having so markedly produced them—­and as if also to bring out at last, under pressure, something she had all the while been keeping back—­she took a jump to pure plain reason.  “You haven’t noticed for yourself, but I can’t quite help noticing, that in spite of what you assume—­we assume, if you like—­Maggie wires her joy only to you.  She makes no sign of its overflow to me.”

It was a point—­and, staring a moment, he took account of it.  But he had, as before, his presence of mind—­to say nothing of his kindly humour.  “Why, you complain of the very thing that’s most charmingly conclusive!  She treats us already as one.”

Clearly now, for the girl, in spite of lucidity and logic, there was something in the way he said things—!  She faced him in all her desire to please him, and then her word quite simply and definitely showed it.  “I do like you, you know.”

Well, what could this do but stimulate his humour?  “I see what’s the matter with you.  You won’t be quiet till you’ve heard from the Prince himself.  I think,” the happy man added, “that I’ll go and secretly wire to him that you’d like, reply paid, a few words for yourself.”

It could apparently but encourage her further to smile.  “Reply paid for him, you mean—­or for me?”

“Oh, I’ll pay, with pleasure, anything back for you—­as many words as you like.”  And he went on, to keep it up.  “Not requiring either to see your message.”

She could take it, visibly, as he meant it.  “Should you require to see the Prince’s?”

“Not a bit.  You can keep that also to yourself.”

On his speaking, however, as if his transmitting the hint were a real question, she appeared to consider—­and almost as if for good taste—­that the joke had gone far enough.  “It doesn’t matter.  Unless he speaks of his own movement—!  And why should it be,” she asked, “a thing that would occur to him?”

“I really think,” Mr. Verver concurred, “that it naturally wouldn’t.  He doesn’t know you’re morbid.”