Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/372

THE GOLDEN BOWL of the long windows and passed out to the balcony she asked herself but for a few seconds whether reality, should she follow him, would overtake or meet her there. She followed him of necessity—it came absolutely so near to his inviting her, by stepping off into temporary detachment, to give the others something of the chance that she and her husband had so fantastically discussed. Beside him then, while they hung over the great dull place, clear and almost coloured now, coloured with the odd sad pictured "old-fashioned" look that empty London streets take on in waning afternoons of the summer's end, she felt once more how impossible such a passage would have been to them, how it would have torn them to pieces, if they had so much as suffered its suppressed relations to peep out of their eyes. This danger would doubtless indeed have been more to be reckoned with if the instinct of each—she could certainly at least answer for her own—hadn't so successfully acted to trump up other apparent connexions for it, connexions as to which they could pretend to be frank.

"You mustn't stay on here, you know," Adam Verver said as a result of his unobstructed outlook. "Fawns is all there for you of course—to the end of my tenure. But Fawns so dismantled," he added with mild ruefulness, "Fawns with half its contents and half its best things removed, won't seem to you, I'm afraid, particularly lively."

"No," Maggie answered, "we should miss its best things. Its best things, my dear, have certainly been removed. To be back there," she went on, "to be 362