Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/74

 III

had been said as a joke, but as after this they awaited their friend in silence the effect of the silence was to turn the time to gravity—a gravity not dissipated even when the Prince next spoke. He had been thinking the case over and making up his mind. A handsome clever odd girl staying with one was a complication. Mrs. Assingham so far was right. But there were the facts—the good relations, from school days, of the two young women, and the clear confidence with which one of them had arrived. "She can come, you know, at any time, to us."

Mrs. Assingham took it up with an irony beyond laughter. "You'd like her for your honeymoon?"

"Oh no, you must keep her for that. But why not after?"

She had looked at him a minute; then at the sound of a voice in the corridor they had got up. "Why not? You're splendid!"

Charlotte Stant, the next minute, was with them, ushered in as she had alighted from her cab and prepared for not finding Mrs. Assingham alone—this would have been to be noticed—by the butler's answer, on the stairs, to a question put to him. She could have looked at that lady with such straightness and brightness only from knowing that the Prince was also there—the discrimination of but a moment, yet which let him take her in still better than if she had 44