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 beautiful y," said the Prince.

"I say 'generously' because I mean she hasn't, in any way, counted the cost. She'l have it to count, in a manner, now," his hostess continued. "But that doesn't matter." He could see how little. "You'l look after her."

"I'l look after her."

"So it's al right."

"It's al right," said Mrs. Assingham. "Then why are you troubled?" It pul ed 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 fal ing over the sil for his support, had gaily and gal antly come to show himself: always moreover less in his own interest than in that of spectators and subjects whose need to admire, even to gape, was periodical y 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 al 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, wel , I'M not!" he rang out clear.

The Legal Smal Print

22

"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 real y like them. They're quite my element." He deferred, for her, to this account of herself. "But stil ," 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 wil 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.