THE PRINCESS
for half an hour, simply daughter and father had glimmered out for them and they had picked up the pretext that would make it easiest. They were husband and wife—oh so immensely!—as regards other persons; but after they had dropped again on their old bench, conscious that the party on the terrace, augmented as in the past by neighbours, would do beautifully without them, it was wonderfully like their having got together into some boat and paddled off from the shore where husbands and wives, luxuriant complications, made the air too tropical. In the boat they were father and daughter, and poor Dotty and Kitty supplied abundantly, for their situation, the oars or the sail. Why, into the bargain, for that matter—this came to Maggie—couldn't they always live, so far as they lived together, in a boat? She felt in her face with the question the breath of a possibility that soothed her; they needed only know each other henceforth in the unmarried relation. That other sweet evening in the same place he had been as unmarried as possible—which had kept down, so to speak, the quantity of change in their state. Well then that other sweet evening was what the present sweet evening would resemble; with the quite calculable effect of an exquisite inward refreshment. They had after all, whatever happened, always and ever each other; each other—that was the hidden treasure and the saving truth—to do exactly what they would with: a provision full of possibilities. Who could tell as yet what, thanks to it, they wouldn't have done before the end?
They had meanwhile been tracing together, in the
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