Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/361

THE PRINCESS "Then wait." And his raised Italian hand, with its play of admonitory fingers, had never made gesture more expressive. His voice dropped to a tone—! "Wait," he repeated. "Wait."

She understood, but it was as if she wished to have it from him. "Till they've been here, you mean?"

"Yes, till they've gone. Till they're away."

She kept it up. "Till they've left the country?" She had her eyes on him for clearness; these were the conditions of a promise—so that he put the promise practically into his response. "Till we've ceased to see them—for as long as God may grant! Till we're really alone."

"Oh if it's only that—!" When she had drawn from him thus then, as she could feel, the thick breath of the definite—which was the intimate, the immediate, the familiar as she hadn't had them for so long—she turned away again, she put her hand on the knob of the door. But her hand rested at first without a grasp; she had another effort to make, the effort of leaving him, of which everything that had just passed between them, his presence, irresistible, overcharged with it, doubled the difficulty. There was something—she couldn't have told what; it was as if, shut in together, they had come too far—too far for where they were; so that the mere act of her quitting him was like the attempt to recover the lost and gone. She had taken in with her something that within the ten minutes, and especially within the last three or four, had slipped away from her—which it was vain now, wasn't it? to try to appear to clutch or to pick up. That consciousness in fact had a pang, and she 351