Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/261

THE PRINCE Still, oh still a little, she had to think. "We've hurried them you see. Why so breathless a start?"

"Because they want to congratulate us. They want," said Adam Verver, "to see our happiness."

She wondered again—and this time also, for him, as publicly as possible. "So much as that?"

"Do you think it's too much?"

She continued to think plainly. "They weren't to have started for another week."

"Well, what then? Isn't our situation worth the little sacrifice? We'll go back to Rome as soon as you like with them."

This seemed to hold her—as he had previously seen her held, just a trifle inscrutably, by his allusions to what they would do together on a certain contingency. "Worth it, the little sacrifice, for whom? For us, naturally—yes," she said. "We want to see them—for our reasons. That is," she rather dimly smiled, "you do."

"And you do, my dear, too!" he bravely declared.

"Yes then—I do too," she after an instant ungrudgingly enough acknowledged. "For us, however, something depends on it."

"Rather! But does nothing depend on it for them?"

"What can—from the moment that, as appears, they don't want to nip us in the bud? I can imagine their rushing up to prevent us. But an enthusiasm for us that can wait so very little—such intense eagerness, I confess," she went on, "more than a little puzzles me. You may think me," she also added, "ungracious and suspicious, but the Prince can't at 231