Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/376

THE GOLDEN BOWL wasn't to be wasted. To let his daughter know it he had sought this brief privacy. What a blessing accordingly that she could speak her joy in it! His face meanwhile at all events was turned to her, and as she met his eyes again her joy went straight. "It's success, father."

"It's success. And even this," he added as the Principino, appearing alone, deep within, piped across an instant greeting—"even this isn't altogether failure!"

They went in to receive the boy, upon whose introduction to the room by Miss Bogle Charlotte and the Prince got up—seemingly with an impressiveness that had caused Miss Bogle not to give further effect to her own entrance. She had retired, but the Principino's presence by itself sufficiently broke the tension—the subsidence of which, in the great room, ten minutes later, gave to the air something of the quality produced by the cessation of a sustained rattle. Stillness, when the Prince and Princess returned from attending the visitors to their carriage, might have been said to be not so much restored as created; so that whatever next took place in it was foredoomed to remarkable salience. That would have been the case even with so natural, though so futile, a movement as Maggie's going out to the balcony again to follow with her eyes her father's departure. The carriage was out of sight—it had taken her too long solemnly to reascend, and she looked a while only at the great grey space on which, as on the room still more, the shadow of dusk had fallen. Here at first her husband hadn't rejoined 366