are."
Behind the dealer were sundry small cupboards in the wall. Two or three of these Charlotte had seen him open, so that her eyes found themselves resting on those he had not visited. But she completed her admission. "There's nothing here she could wear."
It was only after a moment that her companion rejoined. "Is there anything--do you think--that you could?"
It made her just start. She didn't, at all events, look at the objects; she but looked for an instant very directly at him. "No."
"Ah!" the Prince quietly exclaimed.
"Would it be," Charlotte asked, "your idea to offer me something?"
"Well, why not--as a small ricordo."
"But a ricordo of what?"
"Why, of 'this'--as you yourself say. Of this little hunt."
"Oh, I say it--but hasn't my whole point been that I don't ask you to. Therefore," she demanded--but smiling at him now-- "where's the logic?"
"Oh, the logic--!" he laughed.
"But logic's everything. That, at least, is how I feel it. A ricordo from you--from you to me--is a ricordo of nothing. It has no reference."
"Ah, my dear!" he vaguely protested. Their entertainer, meanwhile, stood there with his eyes on them, and the girl, though at this minute more interested in her passage with her friend than in anything else, again met his gaze. It was a comfort to her that their foreign tongue covered what they said-- and they might have appeared of course, as the Prince now had one of the snuffboxes in his hand, to be discussing a purchase.
"You don't refer," she went on to her companion. "_I_ refer."
He had lifted the lid of his little box and he looked into it hard. "Do you mean by that then that you would be free--?"
"'Free'--?"
"To offer me something?"
This gave her a longer pause, and when she spoke again she might have seemed, oddly, to be addressing the dealer. "Would you allow me--?"
