Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/350

THE GOLDEN BOWL them feel they floated. What was it that, with the rush of this, just kept her from putting out her hands to him, from catching at him as in the other time, with the superficial impetus he and Charlotte had privately conspired to impart, she had so often, her breath failing her, known the impulse to catch at her father? She did however just yet nothing inconsequent—though she couldn't immediately have said what saved her; and by the time she had neatly folded her telegram she was doing something merely needful.

"I wanted you simply to know—so that you mayn't by accident miss them. For it's the last," said Maggie.

"The last?"

"I take it as their good-bye." And she smiled as she could always smile. "They come in state—to take formal leave. They do everything that's proper. To-morrow," she said, "they go to Southampton."

"If they do everything that's proper," the Prince presently asked, "why don't they at least come to dine?"

She hesitated, yet she lightly enough provided her answer. "That we must certainly ask them. It will be easy for you. But of course they're immensely taken—!"

He wondered. "So immensely taken that they can't—that your father can't—give you his last evening in England?"

This was for Maggie more difficult to meet; yet she was still not without her stop-gap. "That may be what they'll propose—that we shall go somewhere together, the four of us, for a celebration—except that to round it thoroughly off we ought also to have 340