Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/332

324 the girl goes and stays with them. But she does nothing before. Tirez-vous de là.'

The young man sought on the spot to obey this last injunction, and his effort presently produced a flash. 'Oh, if she'll come and stay with us'—all would, easily, be well! The flash went out, however, when Lady Champer returned: 'Then let the Princess invite her.'

Lily a fortnight later simply said to her, from one hour to the other, 'I'm going home,' and took her breath away by sailing om the morrow with the Bransbys. The tense cord had somehow snapped; the proof was in the fact that the Prince, dashing off to his good friend at this crisis an obscure, an ambiguous note, started the same night for Rome. Lady Champer, for the time, sat in darkness, but during the summer many things occurred; and one day in the autumn, quite unheralded and with the signs of some of them in his face, the Prince appeared again before her. He was not long in telling her his story, which was simply that he had come to her, all the way from Rome, for news of Lily and to talk of Lily. She was prepared, as it happened, to meet his impatience; yet her preparation was but little older than his arrival and was deficient moreover in an important particular. She was not prepared to knock him down, and she made him talk to gain time. She had however, to understand, put a primary question: 'She never wrote, then?'

'Mamma? Oh yes—when she at last got frightened at Miss Gunton's having become so silent. She wrote in August; but Lily's own decisive letter—letter to me, I mean—crossed with it. It was too late—that put an end.'

'A real end?'

Everything in the young man showed how real. 'On the ground of her being willing no longer to keep up, by the stand she had taken, such a relation between mamma and me. But her rupture,' he wailed, 'keeps it up more than anything else.'

'And is it very bad?'