en this were almost too
grave, he sounded the note that had least to do with himself. "Est-elle
toujours aussi belle?" That was the furthest point, somehow, to which
Charlotte Stant could be relegated.

Mrs. Assingham treated it freely. "Just the same. The person in the
world, to my sense, whose looks are most subject to appreciation. It's
all in the way she affects you. One admires her if one doesn't happen
not to. So, as well, one criticises her."

"Ah, that's not fair!" said the Prince.

"To criticise her? Then there you are! You're answered."

"I'm answered." He took it, humorously, as his lesson--sank his previous
self-consciousness, with excellent effect, in grateful docility. "I only
meant that there are perhaps better things to be done with Miss Stant
than to criticise her. When once you begin THAT, with anyone--!" He was
vague and kind.

"I quite agree that it's better to keep out of it as long as one can.
But when one MUST do it--"

"Yes?" he asked as she paused. "Then know what you mean."

"I see. Perhaps," he smiled, "_I_ don't know what I mean."

"Well, it's what, just now, in all ways, you particularly should know."
Mrs. Assingham, however, made no more of this, having, before anything
else, apparently, a scruple about the tone she had just used. "I quite
understand, of course, that, given her great friendship with Maggie, she
should have wanted to be present. She has acted impulsively--but she has
acted generously."

"She has acted beautifully," said the Prince.

"I say 'generously' because I mean she hasn't, in any way, counted the
cost. She'll have it to count, in a manner, now," his hostess continued.
"But that doesn't matter."

He could see how little. "You'll look after her."

"I'll look after her."

"So it's all right."

"It's all right," said Mrs. Assingham. "Then why are you troubled?"

It pulled her up--but only for a minute. "I'm not--any more than you."

The Prince's dark blue eyes were of the finest, and, on occasion,
precisely, resembled nothing so much as the high windows of a Roman
palace, of an historic front by one of the great old designers, thrown
open on a feast-day to the golden air. His look itself, at such times,
suggested an image--that of some very noble personage who, expected,
acclaimed by the crowd in the street and with old precious stuffs
falling over the sill for his support, had gaily and gallantly come to
show himself: always moreover less in his own in