She had laughed again, as she had laughed before, on his producing for her that good right word about the happy issue of his connection with the Prince--with an effect the more odd perhaps as she had not contested its value.

She couldn't of course, however, be, at the best, as much in love with his discovery as he was himself.

He was so much so that he fairly worked it--to his own comfort; came in fact sometimes near publicly pointing the moral of what might have occurred if friction, so to speak, had occurred.

He pointed it frankly one day to the personage in question, mentioned to the Prince the particular justice he did him, was even explicit as to the danger that, in their remarkable relation, they had thus escaped.

Oh, if he HAD been angular!--who could say what might THEN have happened?
He spoke--and it was the way he had spoken to Mrs.Assingham too--as if he grasped the facts, without exception, for which angularity stood.
It figured for him, clearly, as a final idea, a conception of the last vividness.