igure has, however, a freedom that the occasion doubtless scarce
demands, though we may retain it for its rough negative value. It was to
come to pass, by a pressure applied to the situation wholly from within,
that before the first ten days of November had elapsed he found himself
practically alone at Fawns with his young friend; Amerigo and Maggie
having, with a certain abruptness, invited his assent to their going
abroad for a month, since his amusement was now scarce less happily
assured than his security. An impulse eminently natural had stirred
within the Prince; his life, as for some time established, was
deliciously dull, and thereby, on the whole, what he best liked; but a
small gust of yearning had swept over him, and Maggie repeated to her
father, with infinite admiration, the pretty terms in which, after it
had lasted a little, he had described to her this experience. He called
it a "serenade," a low music that, outside one of the windows of the
sleeping house, disturbed his rest at night. Timid as it was, and
plaintive, he yet couldn't close his eyes for it, and when finally,
rising on tiptoe, he had looked out, he had recognised in the figure
below with a mandolin, all duskily draped in her grace, the raised
appealing eyes and the one irresistible voice of the ever-to-be-loved
Italy. Sooner or later, that way, one had to listen; it was a hovering,
haunting ghost, as of a creature to whom one had done a wrong, a dim,
pathetic shade crying out to be comforted. For this there was obviously
but one way--as there were doubtless also many words for the simple
fact that so prime a Roman had a fancy for again seeing Rome. They would
accordingly--hadn't they better?--go for a little; Maggie meanwhile
making the too-absurdly artful point with her father, so that he
repeated it, in his amusement, to Charlotte Stant, to whom he was by
this time conscious of addressing many remarks, that it was absolutely,
when she came to think, the first thing Amerigo had ever asked of her.
"She doesn't count of course his having asked of her to marry him"--
this was Mr. Verver's indulgent criticism; but he found Charlotte,
equally touched by the ingenuous Maggie, in easy agreement with him over
the question. If the Prince had asked something of his wife every day
in the year, this would be still no reason why the poor dear man should
not, in a beautiful fit of homesickness, revisit, without reproach, his
native country.

What his fa