She had not less promptly kissed her stepmother, and then had bent over her father, from behind, and laid her cheek upon him; little amenities tantamount heretofore to an easy change of guard--Charlotte's own frequent, though always cheerful, term of comparison for this process of transfer.

Maggie figured thus as the relieving sentry, and so smoothly did use and custom work for them that her mate might even, on this occasion, after acceptance of the pass-word, have departed without irrelevant and, in strictness, unsoldierly gossip.

This was not, none the less, what happened; inasmuch as if our young woman had been floated over her first impulse to break the existing charm at a stroke, it yet took her but an instant to sound, at any risk, the note she had been privately practising.

If she had practised it the day before, at dinner, on Amerigo, she knew but the better how to begin for it with Mrs.Verver, and it immensely helped her, for that matter, to be able at once to speak of the Prince as having done more to quicken than to soothe her curiosity.

Frankly and gaily she had come to ask--to ask what, in their unusually prolonged campaign, the two had achieved.