"Do you mean because you're going?"

"Oh yes, of course we're going. I've wanted immensely to go." She
hesitated. "But now?--immediately?"

"In a month or two--it seems to be the new idea." On which there was
something in her face--as he imagined--that made him say: "Didn't Maggie
write to you?"

"Not of your going at once. But of course you must go. And of course you
must stay"--Charlotte was easily clear--"as long as possible."

"Is that what you did?" he laughed. "You stayed as long as possible?"

"Well, it seemed to me so--but I hadn't 'interests.' You'll have
them--on a great scale. It's the country for interests," said Charlotte.
"If I had only had a few I doubtless wouldn't have left it."

He waited an instant; they were still on their feet. "Yours then are
rather here?"

"Oh, mine!"--the girl smiled. "They take up little room, wherever they
are."

It determined in him, the way this came from her and what it somehow
did for her-it determined in him a speech that would have seemed a few
minutes before precarious and in questionable taste. The lead she
had given him made the difference, and he felt it as really a lift on
finding an honest and natural word rise, by its license, to his lips.
Nothing surely could be, for both of them, more in the note of a high
bravery. "I've been thinking it all the while so probable, you know,
that you would have seen your way to marrying."

She looked at him an instant, and, just for these seconds, he feared for
what he might have spoiled. "To marrying whom?"

"Why, some good, kind, clever, rich American."

Again his security hung in the balance--then she was, as he felt,
admirable.

"I tried everyone I came across. I did my best. I showed I had come,
quite publicly, FOR that. Perhaps I showed it too much. At any rate
it was no use. I had to recognise it. No one would have me." Then
she seemed to show as sorry for his having to hear of her anything so
disconcerting. She pitied his feeling about it; if he was disappointed
she would cheer him up. "Existence, you know, all the same, doesn't
depend on that. I mean," she smiled, "on having caught a husband."

"Oh--existence!" the Prince vaguely commented. "You think I ought to
argue for more than mere existence?" she asked. "I don't see why MY
existence--even reduced as much as you like to being merely mine--should
be so impossible. There are things, of sorts, I should be able to
have--things I should be able to be. The