He remembered how, from the first of their acquaintance, she had made no display of it, quite as if English, between them, his English so matching with hers, were their inevitable medium. He had perceived al by accident--by hearing her talk before him to somebody else that they had an alternative as good; an alternative in fact as much better as the amusement for him was greater in watching her for the slips that never came. Her account of the mystery didn't suffice: her recal of her birth in Florence and Florentine childhood; her parents, from the great country, but themselves already of a corrupt generation, demoralised, falsified, polyglot wel before her, with the Tuscan balia who was her first remembrance; the servants of the vil a, the dear contadini of the poder, the little girls and the other peasants of the next podere, al the rather shabby but stil ever so pretty human furniture of her early time, including the good sisters of the poor convent of the Tuscan hil s, the convent shabbier than almost anything else, but prettier too, in which she had been kept at school til the subsequent phase, the phase of the much grander institution in Paris at which Maggie was to arrive, terribly frightened, and as a smal er girl, three years before her own ending of her period of five. Such reminiscences, natural y, gave a ground, but they had not prevented him from insisting that some strictly civil ancestor--generations back, and from the Tuscan hil s if she would-made himself felt, ineffaceably, in her blood and in her tone. She knew nothing of the ancestor, but she had taken his theory from him, graceful y enough, as one of the little presents that make friendship flourish. These matters, however, al melted together now, though a sense of them was doubtless concerned, not unnatural y, in the next thing, of the nature of a surmise, that his discretion let him articulate. "You haven't, I rather gather, particularly liked your country?" They would stick, for the time, to their English.

"It doesn't, I fear, seem particularly mine. And it doesn't in the least matter, over there, whether one likes it or not--that is to anyone but one's self. But I didn't like it," said Charlotte Stant.

"That's not encouraging then to me, is it?" the Prince went on.

"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?"

"Wel , it seemed to me so--but I hadn't 'interests.' You'l 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 stil 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 The Legal Smal Print

27

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 real y 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 al 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.