But why not after ?" She had looked at him a minute; then, at the sound of a voice in the corridor, they had got up.

"Why not?
You're splendid!" Charlotte Stant, the next minute, was with them, ushered in as she had alighted from her cab, and prepared for not finding Mrs.Assingham alone--this would have been to be noticed--by the butler's answer, on the stairs, to a question put to him.

She could have looked at her hostess with such straightness and brightness only from knowing that the Prince was also there--the discrimination of but a moment, yet which let him take her in still better than if she had instantly faced him.

He availed himself of the chance thus given him, for he was conscious of all these things.

What he accordingly saw, for some seconds, with intensity, was a tall, strong, charming girl who wore for him, at first, exactly the look of her adventurous situation, a suggestion, in all her person, in motion and gesture, in free, vivid, yet altogether happy indications of dress, from the becoming compactness of her hat to the shade of tan in her shoes, of winds and waves and custom-houses, of far countries and long journeys, the knowledge of how and where and the habit, founded on experience, of not being afraid.