For which Amerigo’s answer again took him a moment.  “Ah, the dear old boy!  You would like me to propose him something—?”

“Well, if you think you could bear it.”

“And leave,” the Prince asked, “you and Charlotte alone?”

“Why not?” Maggie had also to wait a minute, but when she spoke it came clear.  “Why shouldn’t Charlotte be just one of my reasons—­my not liking to leave her?  She has always been so good, so perfect, to me—­but never so wonderfully as just now.  We have somehow been more together—­thinking, for the time, almost only of each other; it has been quite as in old days.”  And she proceeded consummately, for she felt it as consummate:  “It’s as if we had been missing each other, had got a little apart—­though going on so side by side.  But the good moments, if one only waits for them,” she hastened to add, “come round of themselves.  Moreover you’ve seen for yourself, since you’ve made it up so to father; feeling, for yourself, in your beautiful way, every difference, every air that blows; not having to be told or pushed, only being perfect to live with, through your habit of kindness and your exquisite instincts.  But of course you’ve seen, all the while, that both he and I have deeply felt how you’ve managed; managed that he hasn’t been too much alone and that I, on my side, haven’t appeared, to—­what you might call—­ neglect him.  This is always,” she continued, “what I can never bless you enough for; of all the good things you’ve done for me you’ve never done anything better.”  She went on explaining as for the pleasure of explaining—­even though knowing he must recognise, as a part of his easy way too, her description of his large liberality.  “Your taking the child down yourself, those days, and your coming, each time, to bring him away—­nothing in the world, nothing you could have invented, would have kept father more under the charm.  Besides, you know how you’ve always suited him, and how you’ve always so beautifully let it seem to him that he suits you.  Only it has been, these last weeks, as if you wished—­just in order to please him—­to remind him of it afresh.  So there it is,” she wound up; “it’s your doing.  You’ve produced your effect—­that of his wanting not to be, even for a month or two, where you’re not.  He doesn’t want to bother or bore you—­that, I think, you know, he never has done; and if you’ll only give me time I’ll come round again to making it my care, as always, that he shan’t.  But he can’t bear you out of his sight.”

She had kept it up and up, filling it out, crowding it in; and all, really, without difficulty, for it was, every word of it, thanks to a long evolution of feeling, what she had been primed to the brim with.  She made the picture, forced it upon him, hung it before him; remembering, happily, how he had gone so far, one day, supported by the Principino, as to propose the Zoo in Eaton Square, to carry with him there, on the spot, under this pleasant inspiration, both