“And would you like to be here alone with her for a month?”

“I could do with it beautifully.  Or we might even,” she said quite gaily, “go together down to Fawns.”

“You could be so very content without me?” the Prince presently inquired.

“Yes, my own dear—­if you could be content for a while with father.  That would keep me up.  I might, for the time,” she went on, “go to stay there with Charlotte; or, better still, she might come to Portland Place.”

“Oho!” said the Prince with cheerful vagueness.

“I should feel, you see,” she continued, “that the two of us were showing the same sort of kindness.”

Amerigo thought.  “The two of us?  Charlotte and I?”

Maggie again hesitated.  “You and I, darling.”

“I see, I see”—­he promptly took it in.  “And what reason shall I give—­give, I mean, your father?”

“For asking him to go off?  Why, the very simplest—­if you conscientiously can.  The desire,” said Maggie, “to be agreeable to him.  Just that only.”

Something in this reply made her husband again reflect.  “‘Conscientiously?’ Why shouldn’t I conscientiously?  It wouldn’t, by your own contention,” he developed, “represent any surprise for him.  I must strike him sufficiently as, at the worst, the last person in the world to wish to do anything to hurt him.”

Ah, there it was again, for Maggie—­the note already sounded, the note of the felt need of not working harm!  Why this precautionary view, she asked herself afresh, when her father had complained, at the very least, as little as herself?  With their stillness together so perfect, what had suggested so, around them, the attitude of sparing them?  Her inner vision fixed it once more, this attitude, saw it, in the others, as vivid and concrete, extended it straight from her companion to Charlotte.  Before she was well aware, accordingly, she had echoed in this intensity of thought Amerigo’s last words.  “You’re the last person in the world to wish to do anything to hurt him.”

She heard herself, heard her tone, after she had spoken, and heard it the more that, for a minute after, she felt her husband’s eyes on her face, very close, too close for her to see him.  He was looking at her because he was struck, and looking hard—­though his answer, when it came, was straight enough.  “Why, isn’t that just what we have been talking about—­that I’ve affected you as fairly studying his comfort and his pleasure?  He might show his sense of it,” the Prince went on, “by proposing to me an excursion.”

“And you would go with him?” Maggie immediately asked.

He hung fire but an instant.  “Per Dio!”

She also had her pause, but she broke it—­since gaiety was in the air—­with an intense smile.  “You can say that safely, because the proposal’s one that, of his own motion, he won’t make.”

She couldn’t have narrated afterwards—­and in fact was at a loss to tell herself—­by what transition, what rather marked abruptness of change in their personal relation, their drive came to its end with a kind of interval established, almost confessed to, between them.  She felt it in the tone with which he repeated, after her, “’Safely’—?”