Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/522

 occasion demanded. "I should like to sit here a little and speak to this good friend — alone."

"At your pleasure, cara mia," said the Prince.

The tone of each was measured, to Rowland's ear; but that of Christina was not imperceptibly dry and that of her husband irreproachably urbane. Rowland remembered how the Cavaliere had told him that Mrs. Light's candidate had, in his way, the inner as well as the outer marks of the grand seigneur, and our friend wondered how he relished a certain curtness. He was, comparatively speaking, an Italian of the undemonstrative type, but Rowland nevertheless divined that, like other potentates, great and small, before him, he had had to look concessions in the face. "Shall I come back?" he imperturbably asked.

"In half an hour," said Christina.

In the clear outer light Rowland's first impression of her was that her beauty had received some strange accession, affecting him after the manner of a musical composition better "given," to his sense, than ever before. And yet in three months she could hardly have changed; the change was in Rowland's own vision of her, in which that last interview on the eve of her marriage had sown the seeds of a new appreciation.

"How came you to be in this queer place?" she asked. "Are you making a stay?"

"I 'm staying at Engelthal, some ten miles away. I walked over."

"Then you 're alone?"

"I 'm with Roderick Hudson."

"Is he here with you now?" 488