legram; 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?"

She hesitated, yet she lightly enough provided her answer. "That we
must certainly ask them. It will be easy for you. But of course they're
immensely taken--!"

He wondered. "So immensely taken that they can't--that your father
can't--g