He was looking at her because he was struck, and looking hard--though his answer, when it came, was straight enough.

"Why, isn't that just what we have been talking about--that I've affected you as fairly studying his comfort and his pleasure?
He might show his sense of it," the Prince went on, "by proposing to ME an excursion." "And you would go with him ?" Maggie immediately asked.
He hung fire but an instant.

"Per Dio!" She also had her pause, but she broke it--since gaiety was in the air--with an intense smile.

"You can say that safely, because the proposal's one that, of his own motion, he won't make." She couldn't have narrated afterwards--and in fact was at a loss to tell herself--by what transition, what rather marked abruptness of change in their personal relation, their drive came to its end with a kind of interval established, almost confessed to, between them.

She felt it in the tone with which he repeated, after her, "'Safely'-- ?" "Safely as regards being thrown with him perhaps after all, in such a case, too long.