THE PRINCE
all this, that she felt a little sick. For it wasn't the Prince she had been prepared to regard as primarily the shaky one. Shakiness in Charlotte she had at the most perhaps postulated—it would be, she somehow felt, more easy to deal with. Therefore if he had come so far it was a different pair of sleeves. There was nothing to choose between them. It made her so helpless that, as the time passed without her alighting, the Colonel came back and fairly drew her forth; after which, on the pavement, under the street-lamp, their very silence might have been the mark of something grave—their silence eked out for her by his giving her his arm and their then crawling up their steps quite mildly and unitedly together, like some old Darby and Joan who have had a disappointment. It almost resembled a return from a funeral—unless indeed it resembled more the hushed approach to a house of mourning. What indeed had she come home for but to inter, as decently as possible, her mistake?
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