It was impossible that our young man shouldn’t become aware at the end of ten minutes that he had charmed the Princess into the deepest, most genuine attention: she was listening to him as she had never listened before. He enjoyed that high effect on her, and his sense of the tenuity of the thread by which his future hung, renewed by his hearing himself talk about it, made him reflect that at present anything in the line of enjoyment, any scrap filched from the feast of life, was so much gained for eager young experience. The reader may judge if he had held his breath and felt his heart-beats after placing himself on his new footing of utility in the world; but that emotion had finally spent itself, through a hundred forms of restlessness, of vain conjecture—through an exaltation which alternated with despair and which, equally with the despair, he concealed more successfully than he supposed. He would have detested the idea that his companion might have heard his voice tremble while he told his story; but though to-day he had really grown used to his danger and resigned, as it were, to his consecration, and though it couldn’t fail to be agreeable to him to perceive that, like some famous novel, he was thrilling, he still couldn’t guess how very remarkable, in such a connexion, the Princess thought his composure, his lucidity, his good humour. It is true she tried to hide her wonder, for she owed it to her self-respect to let it still appear that even such a one as she was prepared for a personal sacrifice as complete. She had the air—or she endeavoured to have it—of accepting for him everything that he accepted for himself; nevertheless there was something rather forced in the smile (lovely as it might be) with which she covered him while she said after a little: “It’s very serious—it’s very serious indeed, isn’t it?” He replied that the serious part was to come—there was no particular grimness for him (comparatively) in strolling in that fine park and gossiping with her about the matter; and it occurred to her presently to suggest to him that perhaps Hoffendahl would never give him any sign at all, so that he might wait, all the while sur les dents, in a false suspense. He admitted that this would be a sell, but declared that either way he should be sold, though differently; and that at any rate he would have conformed to the great religious rule—to live each hour as if it were to be one’s last.
“In holiness, you mean—in great recueillement?” the Princess asked.
“Oh dear no; simply in extreme thankfulness for every good minute that’s added.”
“Ah well, there will probably be a great many good minutes,” she returned.
“The more the better—if they’re as good as this one.”
“That won’t be the case with many of them in Lomax Place.”
“I assure you that since that night Lomax Place has improved.” Hyacinth stood there smiling, his hands in his pockets and his hat pushed back.
The Princess appeared to consider this quaint truth, as well as the charming facts of his appearance and attitude, with an extreme intellectual curiosity. “If after all then you’re not called you’ll have been positively happy.”
“I shall have had some fine moments. Perhaps Hoffendahl’s plot is simply for that: Muniment may have put him up to it!”
“Who knows? However, with me you must go on as if nothing were changed.”