"I've been thinking of Maggie, and at last I yearned for her. I wanted to see her happy-and it doesn't strike me I find you too shy to tel me I SHALL."

"Of course she's happy, thank God! Only it's almost terrible, you know, the happiness of young, good, generous creatures. It rather frightens one. But the Blessed Virgin and al the Saints," said the Prince, "have her in their keeping."

"Certainly they have. She's the dearest of the dear. But I needn't tel you," the girl added.

"Ah," he returned with gravity, "I feel that I've stil much to learn about her." To which he subjoined "She'l rejoice awful y in your being with us."

"Oh, you don't need me!" Charlotte smiled. "It's her hour. It's a great hour. One has seen often enough, with girls, what it is. But that," she said, "is exactly why. Why I've wanted, I mean, not to miss it." He bent on her a kind, comprehending face. "You mustn't miss anything." He had got it, the pitch, and he could keep it now, for al he had needed was to have it given him. The pitch was the happiness of his wife that was to be--the sight of that happiness as a joy for an old friend. It was, yes, magnificent, and not the less so for its coming to him, suddenly, as sincere, as nobly exalted. Something in Charlotte's eyes seemed to tel him this, seemed to plead with him in advance as to what he was to find in it. He was eager--and he tried to show her that too--to find what she liked; mindful as he easily could be of what the friendship had been for Maggie. It had been armed with the wings of young imagination, young generosity; it had been, he believed--always counting out her intense devotion to her father--the liveliest emotion she had known before the dawn of the sentiment inspired by himself. She had not, to his knowledge, invited the object of it to their wedding, had not thought of proposing to her, for a matter of a couple object of it to their wedding, had not thought of proposing to her, for a matter of a couple of hours, an arduous and expensive journey. But she had kept her connected and informed, from week to week, in spite of preparations and absorptions. "Oh, I've been writing to Charlotte--I wish you knew her better:" he could stil hear, from recent weeks, this record of the fact, just as he could stil be conscious, not otherwise than queerly, of the gratuitous element in Maggie's wish, which he had failed as yet to indicate to her. Older and perhaps more intel igent, at any rate, why shouldn't Charlotte respond--and be quite FREE to respond--to such fidelities with something more than mere formal good manners? The relations of women with each other were of the strangest, it was true, and he probably wouldn't have trusted here a young person of his own race. He was proceeding throughout on the ground of the immense difference--difficult indeed as it might have been to disembroil in this young person HER racequality. Nothing in her definitely placed her; she was a rare, a special product. Her singleness, her solitude, her want of means, that is her want of ramifications and other advantages, contributed to enrich her somehow with an odd, precious neutrality, to constitute for her, so detached yet so aware, a sort of smal social capital. It was the only one she had--it was the only one a lonely, gregarious girl COULD have, since few, surely, had in anything like the same degree arrived at it, and since this one indeed had compassed it but through the play of some gift of nature to which you could scarce give a definite name. It wasn't a question of her strange sense for tongues, with which she juggled as a conjuror at a show juggled The Legal Smal Print

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with bal s or hoops or lighted brands--it wasn't at least entirely that, for he had known people almost as polyglot whom their accomplishment had quite failed to make interesting. He was polyglot himself, for that matter--as was the case too with so many of his friends and relations; for none of whom, more than for himself, was it anything but a common convenience. The point was that in this young woman it was a beauty in itself, and almost a mystery: so, certainly, he had more than once felt in noting, on her lips, that rarest, among the Barbarians, of al civil graces, a perfect felicity in the use of Italian. He had known strangers--a few, and mostly men--who spoke his own language agreeably; but he had known neither man nor woman who showed for it Charlotte's almost mystifying instinct.