Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/306

 V

resemblance hadn't been present to her on first coming out into the hot still brightness of the Sunday afternoon—only the second Sunday, of all the summer, when the party of six, the party of seven including the Principino, had practically been without accessions or invasions; but within sight of Charlotte seated far away and very much where she had expected to find her the Princess fell to wondering if her friend wouldn't be affected quite as she herself had been that night on the terrace under Mrs. Verver's perceptive pursuit. The relation to-day had turned itself round; Charlotte was seeing her come through patches of lingering noon quite as she had watched Charlotte menace her through the starless dark; and there was a moment, that of her waiting a little as they thus met across the distance, when the interval was bridged by a recognition not less soundless and to all appearance not less charged with strange meanings than that of the other occasion. The point however was that they had changed places; Maggie had from her window seen her stepmother leave the house—at so unlikely an hour, three o'clock of a canicular August, for a ramble in garden or grove—and had thereupon felt her impulse determined with the same sharpness that had made the spring of her companion's three weeks before. It was the hottest day of the season, and the shaded siesta, for people all at 296