Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/322

314 'Well, we're all bound by that promise. And of course you'll come!'

'Ah, my dear child!' Lady Champer gasped.

'You can come with the old Princess. You'll be just the right company for her.'

The elder friend considered afresh, with depth, the younger's beauty and serenity. 'You are, love, beyond everything!'

The beauty and serenity took on for a moment a graver cast. 'Why do you so often say that to me?'

'Because you so often make it the only thing to say. But you'll some day find out why,' Lady Champer added with an intention of encouragement.

Lily Gunton, however, was a young person to whom encouragement looked queer; she had grown up without need of it, and it seemed indeed scarce required in her situation. 'Do you mean you believe his mother won't come?'

'Over mountains and seas to see you married?—and to be seen also of the girls? If she does, I will. But we had perhaps better,' Lady Champer wound up, 'not count our chickens before they're hatched.' To which, with one of the easy returns of gaiety that were irresistible in her, Lily made answer that neither of the ladies in question struck her quite as chickens.

The Prince at all events presented himself in London with a promptitude that contributed to make the warning gratuitous. Nothing could have exceeded, by this time, Lady Champer's appreciation of her young friend, whose merits 'town' at the beginning of June threw into renewed relief; but she had the imagination of greatness and, though she believed she tactfully kept it to herself, she thought what the young man had thus done a great deal for a Roman prince to do. Take him as he was, with the circumstances—and they were certainly peculiar, and he was charming—it was a far cry for him from Piazza Colonna to Clarges Street. If Lady Champer had the imagination of greatness, which the Prince in all sorts of ways