Each of these persons--counting out, that is, the Prince and the Colonel, who didn't care, and who didn't even see that the others did--knew something, or had at any rate had her idea; the idea, precisely, that this was what Mrs.Rance, artfully biding her time, WOULD do.

The special shade of apprehension on the part of the Miss Lutches might indeed have suggested the vision of an energy supremely asserted.

It was droll, in truth, if one came to that, the position of the Miss Lutches: they had themselves brought, they had guilelessly introduced Mrs.Rance, strong in the fact of Mr.Rance's having been literally beheld of them; and it was now for them, positively, as if their handful of flowers--since Mrs.Rance was a handful!--had been but the vehicle of a dangerous snake.

Mr.Verver fairly felt in the air the Miss Lutches' imputation--in the intensity of which, really, his own propriety might have been involved.
That, none the less, was but a flicker; what made the real difference, as I have hinted, was his mute passage with Maggie.

His daughter's anxiety alone had depths, and it opened out for him the wider that it was altogether new.