terest than in that
of spectators and subjects whose need to admire, even to gape, was
periodically to be considered. The young man's expression became,
after this fashion, something vivid and concrete--a beautiful personal
presence, that of a prince in very truth, a ruler, warrior, patron,
lighting up brave architecture and diffusing the sense of a function. It
had been happily said of his face that the figure thus appearing in
the great frame was the ghost of some proudest ancestor. Whoever the
ancestor now, at all events, the Prince was, for Mrs. Assingham's
benefit, in view of the people. He seemed, leaning on crimson damask,
to take in the bright day. He looked younger than his years; he was
beautiful, innocent, vague.

"Oh, well, I'M not!" he rang out clear.

"I should like to SEE you, sir!" she said. "For you wouldn't have a
shadow of excuse." He showed how he agreed that he would have been at a
loss for one, and the fact of their serenity was thus made as important
as if some danger of its opposite had directly menaced them. The only
thing was that if the evidence of their cheer was so established Mrs.
Assingham had a little to explain her original manner, and she came to
this before they dropped the question. "My first impulse is always to
behave, about everything, as if I feared complications. But I don't fear
them--I really like them. They're quite my element."

He deferred, for her, to this account of herself. "But still,"
he said, "if we're not in the presence of a complication."

She hesitated. "A handsome, clever, odd girl staying with one is always
a complication."

The young man weighed it almost as if the question were new to him. "And
will she stay very long?"

His friend gave a laugh. "How in the world can I know? I've scarcely
asked her."

"Ah yes. You can't."

But something in the tone of it amused her afresh. "Do you think you
could?"

"I?" he wondered.

"Do you think you could get it out of her for me--the probable length of
her stay?"

He rose bravely enough to the occasion and the challenge. "I daresay, if
you were to give me the chance."

"Here it is then for you," she answered; for she had heard, within the
minute, the stop of a cab at her door. "She's back."

III

It had been said as a joke, but as, after this, they awaited their
friend in silence, the effect of the silence was to turn the time to
gravity--a gravity not dissipated even whe