Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/267

THE PRINCE looked at his watch. "It will be here when we get back."

"If it isn't"—and Charlotte smiled as she looked about for a feather boa that she had laid down on descending from her room—"if it isn't it will have had but that slight fault."

He saw her boa on the arm of the chair from which she had moved to meet him, and, after he had fetched it, raising it to make its charming softness brush his face—for it was a wondrous product of Paris, purchased under his direct auspices the day before—he held it there a minute before giving it up. "Will you promise me then to be at peace?"

She looked, while she debated, at his admirable present. "I promise you."

"Quite for ever?"

"Quite for ever."

"Remember," he went on, to justify his demand, "remember that in wiring you she 'll naturally speak even more for her husband than she has done in wiring me."

It was only at a word that Charlotte had a demur. "'Naturally'?"

"Why our marriage puts him for you, you see—or puts you for him—into a new relation, whereas it leaves his relation to me unchanged. It therefore gives him more to say to you about it."

"About its making me his stepmother-in-law—or whatever I should become? " Over which for a little she not undivertedly mused. "Yes, there may easily be enough for a gentleman to say to a young woman about that." 237