Chapter XLIX   
     
MADAME MERLE had not made her appearance at the Palazzo Roccanera on the evening of that Thursday of which I have narrated some of the incidents, and Isabel, though she observed her absence, was not surprised by it. Things had passed between them which added no stimulus to sociability, and to appreciate which we must glance a little backward.      1   
  It has been mentioned that Madame Merle returned from Naples shortly after Lord Warburton had left Rome, and that on her first meeting with Isabel (whom to do her justice, she came immediately to see) her first utterance was an inquiry as to the whereabouts of this nobleman, for whom she appeared to hold her dear friend accountable.      2   
  “Please don’t talk of him,” said Isabel, for answer; “we have heard so much of him of late.”      3   
  Madame Merle bent her head on one side a little, protestingly, and smiled in the left corner of her mouth.      4   
  “You have heard, yes. But you must remember that I have not, in Naples. I hoped to find him here, and to be able to congratulate Pansy.”      5   
  “You may congratulate Pansy still; but not on marrying Lord Warburton.”      6   
  “How you say that! Don’t you know I had set my heart on it?” Madame Merle asked, with a great deal of spirit, but still with the intonation of good-humour.      7   
  Isabel was discomposed, but she was determined to be good-humoured too.      8   
  “You shouldn’t have gone to Naples, then. You should have stayed here to watch the affair.”      9   
  “I had too much confidence in you. But do you think it is too late?”     10   
  “You had better ask Pansy,” said Isabel.     11   
  “I shall ask her what you have said to her.”     12   
  These words seemed to justify the impulse of self-defence aroused on Isabel’s part by her perceiving that her visitor’s attitude was a critical one. Madame Merle, as we know, had been very discreet hitherto; she had never criticised; she had been excessively afraid of intermeddling. But apparently she had only reserved herself for this occasion; for she had a dangerous quickness in her eye, and an air of irritation which even her admirable smile was not able to transmute. She had suffered a disappointment which excited Isabel’s surprise—our heroine having no knowledge of her zealous interest in Pansy’s marriage; and she betrayed it in a manner which quickened Mrs. Osmond’s alarm. More clearly than ever before, Isabel heard a cold, mocking voice proceed from she knew not where, in the dim void that surrounded her, and declare that this bright, strong, definite, worldly woman, this incarnation of the practical, the personal, the immediate, was a powerful agent in her destiny. She was nearer to her than Isabel had yet discovered, and her nearness was not the charming accident that she had so long thought. The sense of accident indeed had died within her that day when she happened to be struck with the manner in which Madame Merle and her own husband sat together in private. No definite suspicion had as yet taken its place; but it was enough to make her look at this lady with a different eye, to have been led to reflect that there was more intention in her past behaviour than she had allowed for at the time. Ah, yes, there had been intention, there had been intention, Isabel said to herself; and she seemed to wake from a long, pernicious dream. What was it that brought it home to her that Madame Merle’s intention had not been good? Nothing but the mistrust which had lately taken body, and which married itself now to the fruitful wonder produced by her visitor’s challenge on behalf of poor Pansy. There was something in this challenge which at the very outset excited an answering defiance; a nameless vitality which Isabel now saw to have been absent from her friend’s professions of delicacy and caution. Madame Merle has been unwilling to interfere, certainly, but only so long as there was nothing to interfere with. It will perhaps seem to the reader that Isabel went fast in casting doubt, on mere suspicion, on a sincerity proved by several years of good offices. She moved quickly, indeed, and with reason, for a strange truth was filtering into her soul. Madame Merle’s interest was identical with Osmond’s; that was enough.     13   
  “I think Pansy will tell you nothing that will make you more angry,” she said, in answer to her companion’s last remark.     14   
  “I am not in the least angry. I have only a great desire to retrieve the situation. Do you think his lordship has left us for ever?”     15   
  “I can’t tell you; I don’t understand you. It’s all over; please let it rest. Osmond has talked to me a great deal about it, and I have nothing more to say or to hear. I have no doubt,” Isabel added, “that he will be very happy to discuss the subject with you.”     16   
  “I know what he thinks; he came to see me last evening.”     17   
  “As soon as you had arrived? Then you know all about it and you needn’t apply to me for information.”     18   
  “It isn’t information I want. At bottom, it’s sympathy. I had set my heart on that marriage; the idea did what so few things do—it satisfied the imagination.”     19   
  “Your imagination, yes. But not that of the persons concerned.”     20   
  “You mean by that of course that I am not concerned. Of course not directly. But when one is such an old friend, one can’t help having something at stake. You forget how long I have known Pansy. You mean, of course,” Madame Merle added, “that you are one of the persons concerned.”     21   
  “No; that’s the last thing I mean. I am very weary of it all.”     22   
  Madame Merle hesitated a little. “Ah yes, your work’s done.”     23   
  “Take care what you say,” said Isabel, very gravely.     24   
  “Oh, I take care; never perhaps more than when it appears least. Your husband judges you severely.”     25   
  Isabel made for a moment no answer to this; she felt choked with bitterness. It was not the insolence of Madame Merle’s informing her that Osmond had been taking her into his confidence as against his wife that struck her most; for she was not quick to believe that this was meant for insolence. Madame Merle was very rarely insolent, and only when it was exactly right. It was not right now, or at least it was not right yet. What touched Isabel like a drop of corrosive acid upon an open wound, was the knowledge that Osmond dishonoured her in his words as well as in his thoughts.     26   
  “Should you like to know how I judge him?” she asked at last.     27   
  “No, because you would never tell me. And it would be painful for me to know.”     28   
  There was a pause, and for the first time since she had known her, Isabel thought Madame Merle disagreeable. She wished she would leave her.     29   
  “Remember how attractive Pansy is, and don’t despair,” she said abruptly, with a desire that this should close their interview.     30   
  But Madame Merle’s expansive presence underwent no contradiction. She only gathered her mantle about her, and, with the movement, scattered upon the air a faint, agreeable fragrance.     31   
  “I don’t despair,” she answered; “I feel encouraged. And I didn’t come to scold you; I came if possible to learn the truth. I know you will tell it if I ask you. It’s an immense blessing with you, that one can count upon that. No, you won’t believe what a comfort I take in it.”     32   
  “What truth do you speak of.” Isabel asked, wondering.     33   
  “Just this: whether Lord Warburton changed his mind quite of his own movement, or because you recommended it. To please himself, I mean; or to please you. Think of the confidence I must still have in you, in spite of having lost a little of it,” Madame Merle continued with a smile, “to ask such a question as that!” She sat looking at Isabel a moment, to judge of the effect of her words, and she went on—“Now don’t be heroic, don’t be unreasonable, don’t take offence. It seems to me I do you an honour in speaking so. I don’t know another woman to whom I would do it. I haven’t the least idea that any other woman would tell me the truth. And don’t you see how well it is that your husband should know it? It is true that he doesn’t appear to have had any tact whatever in trying to extract it; he has indulged in gratuitous suppositions. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it would make a difference in his view of his daughter’s prospects to know distinctly what really occurred. If Lord Warburton simply got tired of the poor child, that’s one thing; it’s a pity. If he gave her up to please you, it’s another. That’s a pity, too; but in a different way. Then, in the latter case, you would perhaps resign yourself to not being pleased—to simply seeing your stepdaughter married. Let him off—let us have him!”     34   
  Madame Merle had proceeded very deliberately, watching her companion and apparently thinking she could proceed safely. As she went on, Isabel grew pale; she clasped her hands more tightly in her lap. It was not that Madame Merle had at last thought it the right time to be insolent; for this was not what was most apparent. It was a worse horror than that. “Who are you—what are you?” Isabel murmured. “What have you to do with my husband?” It was strange that, for the moment, she drew as near to him as if she had loved him.     35   
  “Ah, then you take it heroically! I am very sorry. Don’t think, however, that I shall do so.”     36   
  “What have you to do with me?” Isabel went on.     37   
  Madame Merle slowly got up, stroking her muff, but not removing her eyes from Isabel’s face.     38   
  “Everything!” she answered.     39   
  Isabel sat there looking up at her, without rising; her face was almost a prayer to be enlightened. But the light of her visitor’s eyes seemed only a darkness.     40   
  “Oh, misery!” she murmured at last; and she fell back, covering her face with her hands. It had come over her like a high-surging wave that Mrs. Touchett was right. Madame Merle had married her! Before she uncovered her face again, this lady had left the room.     41   
  Isabel took a drive, alone, that afternoon; she wished to be far away, under the sky, where she could descend from her carriage and tread upon the daisies. She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a winter’s day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness. Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater. She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship in endurance, and the musty incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers. There was no gentler nor less consistent heretic than Isabel; the firmest of worshippers, gazing at dark altar-pictures or clustered candles, could not have felt more intimately the suggestiveness of these objects nor have been more liable at such moments to a spiritual visitation. Pansy, as we know, was almost always her companion, and of late the Countess Gemini, balancing a pink parasol, had lent brilliancy to their equipage; but she still occasionally found herself alone when it suited her mood, and where it suited the place. On such occasions she had several resorts; the most accessible of which perhaps was a seat on the low parapet which edges the wide grassy space lying before the high, cold front of St. John Lateran; where you look across the Campagna at the far-trailing outline of the Alban Mount, and at that mighty plain between, which is still so full of all that has vanished from it. After the departure of her cousin and his companions she wandered about more than usual; she carried her sombre spirit from one familiar shrine to the other. Even when Pansy and the Countess were with her, she felt the touch of a vanished world. The carriage passing out of the walls of Rome, rolled through narrow lanes, where the wild honeysuckle had begun to tangle itself in the hedges, or waited for her in quiet places where the fields lay near, while she strolled further and further over the flower-freckled turf, or sat on a stone that had once had a use, and gazed through the veil of her personal sadness at the splendid sadness of the scene—at the dense, warm light, the far gradations and soft confusions of colour, the motionless shepherds in lonely attitudes, the hills where the cold-shadows had the lightness of a blush.     42   
  On the afternoon I began with speaking of, she had taken a resolution not to think of Madame Merle; but the resolution proved vain, and this lady’s image hovered constantly before her. She asked herself, with an almost childlike horror of the supposition, whether to this intimate friend of several years the great historical epithet of wicked were to be applied. She knew the idea only by the Bible and other literary works; to the best of her belief she had no personal acquaintance with wickedness. She had desired a large acquaintance with human life, and in spite of her having flattered herself that she cultivated it with some success, this elementary privilege had been denied her. Perhaps it was not wicked—in the historic sense—to be false; for that was what Madame Merle had been. Isabel’s Aunt Lydia had made this discovery long before, and had mentioned it to her niece; but Isabel had flattered herself at this time that she had a much richer view of things, especially of the spontaneity of her own career and the nobleness of her own interpretations, than poor stiffly-reasoning Mrs. Touchett. Madame Merle had done what she wanted; she had brought about the union of her two friends; a reflection which could not fail to make it a matter of wonder that she should have desired such an event. There were people who had the match-making passion, like the votaries of art for art; but Madame Merle, great artist as she was, was scarcely one of these. She thought too ill of marriage, too ill even of life; she had desired that marriage, but she had not desired others. She therefore had had an idea of gain, and Isabel asked herself where she had found her profit. It took her, naturally, a long time to discover, and even then her discovery was very incomplete. It came back to her that Madame Merle, though she had seemed to like her from their first meeting at Gardencourt, had been doubly affectionate after Mr. Touchett’s death, and after learning that her young friend was a victim of the good old man’s benevolence. She had found her profit not in the gross device of borrowing money from Isabel, but in the more refined idea of introducing one of her intimates to the young girl’s fortune. She had naturally chosen her closest intimate, and it was already vivid enough to Isabel that Gilbert Osmond occupied this position. She found herself confronted in this manner with the conviction that the man in the world whom she had supposed to be the least sordid, had married her for her money. Strange to say, it had never before occurred to her; if she had thought a good deal of harm of Osmond, she had not done him this particular injury. This was the worst she could think of, and she had been saying to herself that the worst was still to come. A man might marry a woman for her money, very well; the thing was often done. But at least he should let her know!     43   
  She wondered whether, if he wanted her money, her money to-day would satisfy him. Would he take her money and let her go? Ah, if Mr. Touchett’s great charity would help her to-day, it would be blessed indeed! It was not slow to occur to her that if Madame Merle had wished to do Osmond a service, his recognition of the fact must have lost its warmth. What must be his feelings to-day in regard to his too zealous benefactress, and what expression must they have found on the part of such a master of irony? It is a singular, but a characteristic, fact that before Isabel returned from her silent drive she had broken its silence by the soft exclamation—     44   
  “Poor Madame Merle!”     45   
  Her exclamation would perhaps have been justified if on this same afternoon she had been concealed behind one of the valuable curtains of time-softened damask which dressed the interesting little salon of the lady to whom it referred; the carefully-arranged apartment to which we once paid a visit in company with the discreet Mr. Rosier. In that apartment, towards six o’clock, Gilbert Osmond was seated, and his hostess stood before him as Isabel had seen her stand on an occasion commemorated in this history with an emphasis appropriate not so much to its apparent as to its real importance.     46   
  “I don’t believe you are unhappy; I believe you like it,” said Madame Merle.     47   
  “Did I say I was unhappy?” Osmond asked, with a face grave enough to suggest that he might have been so.     48   
  “No, but you don’t say the contrary, as you ought in common gratitude.”     49   
  “Don’t talk about gratitude,” Osmond returned, dryly. “And don’t aggravate me,” he added in a moment.     50   
  Madame Merle slowly seated herself, with her arms folded and her white hands arranged as a support to one of them and an ornament, as it were, to the other. She looked exquisitely calm, but impressively sad.     51   
  “On your side, don’t try to frighten me,” she said. “I wonder whether you know some of my thoughts.”     52   
  “No more than I can help. I have quite enough of my own.”     53   
  “That’s because they are so delightful.”     54   
  Osmond rested his head against the back of his chair and looked at his companion for a long time, with a kind of cynical directness which seemed also partly an expression of fatigue. “You do aggravate me,” he remarked in a moment. “I am very tired.”     55   
  “Eh moi, donc!” cried Madame Merle.     56   
  “With you, it’s because you fatigue yourself. With me, it’s not my own fault.”     57   
  “When I fatigue myself it’s for you. I have given you an interest; that’s a great gift.”     58   
  “Do you call it an interest?” Osmond inquired, languidly.     59   
  “Certainly, since it helps you to pass your time.”     60   
  “The time has never seemed longer to me than this winter.”     61   
  “You have never looked better; you have never been so agreeable, so brilliant.”     62   
  “Damn my brilliancy!” Osmond murmured, thoughtfully. “How little, after all, you know me!”     63   
  “If I don’t know you, I know nothing,” said Madame Merle smiling. “You have the feeling of complete success.”     64   
  “No, I shall not have that till I have made you stop judging me.”     65   
  “I did that long ago. I speak from old knowledge. But you express yourself more, too.”     66   
  Osmond hesitated a moment. “I wish you would express yourself less!”     67   
  “You wish to condemn me to silence? Remember that I have never been a chatterbox. At any rate, there are three or four things that I should like to say to you first—Your wife doesn’t know what to do with herself,” she went on, with a change of tone.     68   
  “Excuse me; she knows perfectly. She has a line sharply marked out. She means to carry out her ideas.”     69   
  “Her ideas, to-day, must be remarkable.”     70   
  “Certainly they are. She has more of them than ever.”     71   
  “She was unable to show me any this morning,” said Madame Merle. “She seemed in a very simple, almost in a stupid, state of mind. She was completely bewildered.”     72   
  “You had better say at once that she was pathetic.”     73   
  “Ah, no, I don’t want to encourage you to much.”     74   
  Osmond still had his head against the cushion behind him; the ankle of one foot rested on the other knee. So he sat for a while. “I should like to know what is the matter with you,” he said, at last.     75   
  “The matter—the matter—” And here Madame Merle stopped. Then she went on, with a sudden outbreak of passion, a burst of summer thunder in a clear sky—“The matter is that I would give my right hand to be able to weep, and that I can’t!”     76   
  “What good would it do you to weep?”     77   
  “It would make me feel as I felt before I knew you.”     78   
  “If I have dried your tears, that’s something. But I have seen you shed them.”     79   
  “Oh, I believe you will make me cry still. I have a great hope of that. I was vile this morning; I was horrid,” said Madame Merle.     80   
  “If Isabel was in the stupid state of mind you mention, she probably didn’t perceive it,” Osmond answered.     81   
  “It was precisely my devilry that stupefied her. I couldn’t help it; I was full of something bad. Perhaps it was something good; I don’t know. You have not only dried up my tears; you have dried up my soul.”     82   
  “It is not I then than am responsible for my wife’s condition,” Osmond said. “It is pleasant to think that I shall get the benefit of your influence upon her. Don’t you know the soul is an immortal principle? How can it suffer alteration?”     83   
  “I don’t believe at all that it’s an immortal principle. I believe it can perfectly be destroyed. That’s what has happened to mine, which was a very good one to start with; and it’s you I have to thank for it.—You are very bad,” Madame Merle added, gravely.     84   
  “Is this the way we are to end?” Osmond asked, with the same studied coldness.     85   
  “I don’t know how we are to end. I wish I did! How do bad people end? You have made me bad.”     86   
  “I don’t understand you. You seem to me quite good enough,” said Osmond, his conscious indifference giving an extreme effect to the words.     87   
  Madame Merle’s self-possession tended on the contrary to diminish, and she was nearer losing it than on any occasion on which we have had the pleasure of meeting her. Her eye brightened, even flashed; her smile betrayed a painful effort. “Good enough for anything that I have done with myself? I suppose that’s what you mean.”     88   
  “Good enough to be always charming!” Osmond exclaimed, smiling too.     89   
  “Oh God!” his companion murmured; and, sitting there in her ripe freshness, she had recourse to the same gesture that she had provoked on Isabel’s part in the morning; she bent her face and covered it with her hands.     90   
  “Are you going to weep, after all?” Osmond asked; and on her remaining motionless he went on—“Have I ever complained to you?”     91   
  She dropped her hands quickly. “No, you have taken your revenge otherwise—you have taken it on her.”     92   
  Osmond threw back his head further; he looked a while at the ceiling, and might have been supposed to be appealing, in an informal way, to the heavenly powers. “Oh, the imagination of women! It’s always vulgar, at bottom. You talk of revenge like a third-rate novelist.”     93   
  “Of course you haven’t complained. You have enjoyed your triumph too much.”     94   
  “I am rather curious to know what you call my triumph.”     95   
  “You have made your wife afraid of you.”     96   
  Osmond changed his position; he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and looking a while at a beautiful old Persian rug, at his feet. He had an air of refusing to accept any one’s valuation of anything, even of time, and of preferring to abide by his own; a peculiarity which made him at moments an irritating person to converse with. “Isabel is not afraid of me, and it’s not what I wish,” he said at last. “To what do you wish to provoke me when you say such things as that?”     97   
  “I have thought over all the harm you can do me,” Madame Merle answered. “Your wife was afraid of me this morning, but in me it was really you she feared.”     98   
  “You may have said things that were in very bad taste; I am not responsible for that. I didn’t see the use of your going to see her at all; you are capable of acting without her. I have not made you afraid of me, that I can see,” Osmond went on; “how then should I have made her? You are at least as brave. I can’t think where you have picked up such rubbish; one might suppose you knew me by this time.” He got up, as he spoke, and walked to the chimney, where he stood a moment bending his eye, as if he had seen them for the first time, on the delicate specimens of rare porcelain with which it was covered. He took up a small cup and held it in his hand; then, still holding it and leaning his arm on the mantel, he continued: “You always see too much in everything; you overdo it; you lose sight of the real. I am much simpler than you think.”     99   
  “I think you are very simple.” And Madame Merle kept her eye upon her cup. “I have come to that with time. I judged you, as I say, of old; but it is only since your marriage that I have understood you. I have seen better what you have been to your wife than I ever saw what you were for me. Please be very careful of that precious object.”    100   
  “It already has a small crack,” said Osmond, dryly, as he put it down. “If you didn’t understand me before I married, it was cruelly rash of you to put me into such a box. However, I took a fancy to my box myself; I thought it would be a comfortable fit. I asked very little; I only asked that she should like me.”    101   
  “That she should like you so much!”    102   
  “So much, of course; in such a case one asks the maximum. That she should adore me, if you will. Oh yes, I wanted that.”    103   
  “I never adored you,” said Madame Merle.    104   
  “Ah, but you pretended to!”    105   
  “It is true that you never accused me of being a comfortable fit,” Madame Merle went on.    106   
  “My wife has declined—declined to do anything of the sort,” said Osmond. “If you are determined to make a tragedy of that, the tragedy is hardly for her.”    107   
  “The tragedy is for me!” Madame Merle exclaimed, rising, with a long low sigh, but giving a glance at the same time at the contents of her mantel-shelf. “It appears that I am to be severely taught the disadvantages of a false position.”    108   
  “You express yourself like a sentence in a copy-book. We must look for our comfort where we can find it. If my wife doesn’t like me, at least my child does. I shall look for compensations in Pansy. Fortunately I haven’t a fault to find with her.”    109   
  “Ah,” said Madame Merle, softly, “if I had a child—”    110   
  Osmond hesitated a moment; and then, with a little formal air—“The children of others may be a great interest!” he announced.    111   
  “You are more like a copy-book than I. There is something after all, that holds us together.”    112   
  “Is it the idea of the harm I may do you?” Osmond asked.    113   
  “No; it’s the idea of the good I may do for you. It is that,” said Madame Merle, “that made me so jealous of Isabel. I want it to be my work,” she added, with her face, which had grown hard and bitter, relaxing into its usual social expression.    114   
  Osmond took up his hat and his umbrella, and after giving the former article two or three strokes with his coat-cuff—“On the whole, I think,” he said, “you had better leave it to me.”    115   
  After he had left her, Madame Merle went and lifted from the mantel-shelf the attenuated coffee—cup in which he had mentioned the existence of a crack; but she looked at it rather abstractedly. “Have I been so vile all for nothing?” she murmured to herself.

Chapter L   
     
AS the Countess Gemini was not acquainted with the ancient monuments, Isabel occasionally offered to introduce her to these interesting relics and to give their afternoon drive an antiquarian aim. The Countess, who professed to think her sister-in-law a prodigy of learning, never made an objection, and gazed at masses of Roman brickwork as patiently as if they had been mounds of modern drapery. She was not an antiquarian; but she was so delighted to be in Rome that she only desired to float with the current. She would gladly have passed an hour every day in the damp darkness of the Baths of Titus, if it had been a condition of her remaining at the Palazzo Roccanera. Isabel, however, was not a severe cicerone; she used to visit the ruins chiefly because they offered an excuse for talking about other matters than the love-affairs of the ladies of Florence, as to which her companion was never weary of offering information. It must be added that during these visits the Countess was not very active; her preference was to sit in the carriage and exclaim that everything was most interesting. It was in this manner that she had hitherto examined the Coliseum, to the infinite regret of her niece, who—with all the respect that she owed her—could not see why she should not descend from the vehicle and enter the building. Pansy had so little chance to ramble that her view of the case was not wholly disinterested; it may be divined that she had a secret hope that, once inside, her aunt might be induced to climb to the upper tiers. There came a day when the Countess announced her willingness to undertake this feat—a mild afternoon in March, when the windy month expressed itself in occasional puffs of spring. The three ladies went into the Coliseum together, but Isabel left her companions to wander over the place. She had often ascended to those desolate ledges from which the Roman crowd used to bellow applause, and where now the wild flowers (when they are allowed), bloom in the deep crevices; and to-day she felt weary, and preferred to sit in the despoiled arena. It made an intermission, too, for the Countess often asked more from one’s attention than she gave in return; and Isabel believed that when she was alone with her niece she let the dust gather for a moment upon the ancient scandals of Florence. She remained below, therefore, while Pansy guided her undiscriminating aunt to the steep brick staircase at the foot of which the custodian unlocks the tall wooden gate. The great inclosure was half in shadow; the western sun brought out the pale red tone of the great blocks of travertine—the latent colour which is the only living element in the immense ruin. Here and there wandered a peasant or a tourist, looking up at the far sky-line where in the clear stillness a multitude of swallows kept circling and plunging. Isabel presently became aware that one of the other visitors, planted in the middle of the arena, had turned his attention to her own person, and was looking at her with a certain little poise of the head, which she had some weeks perceived to be characteristic of baffled but indestructible purpose. Such an attitude, to-day, could belong only to Mr. Edward Rosier; and this gentleman proved in fact to have been considering the question of speaking to her. When he had assured himself that she was unaccompanied he drew near, remarking that though she would not answer his letters she would perhaps not wholly close her ears to his spoken eloquence. She replied that her step-daughter was close at hand and she could only give him five minutes; whereupon he took out his watch and sat down upon a broken block.      1   
  “It’s very soon told,” said Edward Rosier. “I have sold all my bibelots!”      2   
  Isabel gave, instinctively, an exclamation of horror; it was as if he had told her he had all his teeth drawn.      3   
  “I have sold them by auction at the Hôtel Drouot,” he went on. “The sale took place three days ago, and they have telegraphed me the result. It’s magnificent.”      4   
  “I am glad to hear it; but I wish you had kept your pretty things.”      5   
  “I have the money instead—forty thousand dollars. Will Mr. Osmond think me rich enough now?”      6   
  “Is it for that you did it?” Isabel asked, gently.      7   
  “For what else in the world could it be? That is the only thing I think of. I went to Paris and made my arrangements. I couldn’t stop for the sale; I couldn’t have seen them going off; I think it would have killed me. But I put them into good hands, and they brought high prices. I should tell you I have kept my enamels. Now I have got the money in my pocket, and he can’t say I’m poor!” the young man exclaimed, defiantly.      8   
  “He will say now that you are not wise,” said Isabel, as if Gilbert Osmond had never said this before.      9   
  Rosier gave her a sharp look.     10   
  “Do you mean that without my bibelots I am nothing? Do you mean that they were the best thing about me? That’s what they told me in Paris; oh, they were very frank about it. But they hadn’t seen her!”     11   
  “My dear friend, you deserve to succeed,” said Isabel, very kindly.     12   
  “You say that so sadly that it’s the same as if you said I shouldn’t. And he questioned her eye with the clear trepidation of his own. He had the air of a man who knows he has been the talk of Paris for a week and is full half a head taller in consequence; but who also has a painful suspicion that in spite of this increase in stature one or two persons still have the perversity to think him diminutive. “I know what happened here while I was away,” he went on. “What does Mr. Osmond expect, after she has refused Lord Warburton?”     13   
  Isabel hesitated a moment.     14   
  “That she will marry another nobleman.”     15   
  “What other nobleman?”     16   
  “One that he will pick out.”     17   
  Rosier slowly got up, putting his watch into his waistcoat-pocket.     18   
  “You are laughing at some one; but this time I don’t think it’s at me.”     19   
  “I didn’t mean to laugh,” said Isabel. “I laugh very seldom. Now you had better go away.”     20   
  “I feel very safe!” Rosier declared, without moving. This might be; but it evidently made him feel more so to make the announcement in rather a loud voice, balancing himself a little complacently, on his toes, and looking all around the Coliseum, as if it were filled with an audience. Suddenly Isabel saw him change colour; there was more of an audience than he had suspected. She turned, and perceived that her two companions had returned from their excursion.     21   
  “You must really go away,” she said, quickly.     22   
  “Ah, my dear lady, pity me!” Edward Rosier murmured, in voice strangely at variance with the announcement I have just quoted. And then he added, eagerly, like a man who in the midst of his misery is seized by a happy thought—“Is that lady the Countess Gemini? I have a great desire to be presented to her.”     23   
  Isabel looked at him a moment.     24   
  “She has no influence with her brother.”     25   
  “Ah, what a monster you make him out!” Rosier exclaimed, glancing at the Countess, who advanced, in front of Pansy, with an animation partly due perhaps to the fact that she perceived her sister-in-law to be engaged in conversation with a very pretty young man.     26   
  “I am glad you have kept your enamels!” Isabel exclaimed, leaving him. She went straight to Pansy, who, on seeing Edward Rosier, had stopped short, with lowered eyes. “We will go back to the carriage,” said Isabel gently.     27   
  “Yes, it is getting late,” Pansy answered, more gently still. And she went on without a murmur, without faltering or glancing back.     28   
  Isabel, however, allowed herself this last liberty, and saw that a meeting had immediately taken place between the Countess and Mr. Rosier. He had removed his hat, and was bowing and smiling; he had evidently introduced himself; while the Countess’s expressive back displayed to Isabel’s eye a gracious inclination. These facts, however, were presently lost to sight, for Isabel and Pansy took their places again in the carriage. Pansy, who faced her stepmother, at first kept her eyes fixed on her lap; then she raised them and rested them on Isabel’s. There shone out of each of them a little melancholy ray—a spark of timid passion which touched Isabel to the heart. At the same time a wave of envy passed over her soul, as she compared the tremulous longing, the definite ideal, of the young girl with her own dry despair.     29   
  “Poor little Pansy!” she said, affectionately.     30   
  “Oh, never mind!” Pansy answered, in the tone of eager apology.     31   
  And then there was a silence; the Countess was a long time coming.     32   
  “Did you show your aunt everything, and did she enjoy it?” Isabel asked at last.     33   
  “Yes, I showed her everything. I think she was very much pleased.”     34   
  “And you are not tired, I hope.”     35   
  “Oh no, thank you, I am not tired.”     36   
  The Countess still remained behind, so that Isabel requested the footman to go into the Coliseum and tell her that they were waiting. He presently returned with the announcement that the Signora Contessa begged them not to wait—she would come home in a cab!     37   
  About a week after this lady’s quick sympathies had enlisted themselves with Mr. Rosier, Isabel, going rather late to dress for dinner, found Pansy sitting in her room. The girl seemed to have been waiting for her; she got up from her low chair.     38   
  “Excuse my taking the liberty,” she said, in a small voice. “It will be the last—for some time.”     39   
  Her voice was strange, and her eyes, widely opened, had an excited, frightened look.     40   
  “You are not going away!” Isabel exclaimed.     41   
  “I am going to the convent.”     42   
  “To the convent?”     43   
  Pansy drew nearer, till she was near enough to put her arms round Isabel and rest her head on her shoulder. She stood this way a moment, perfectly still; but Isabel could feel her trembling. The tremor of her little body expressed everything that she was unable to say.     44   
  Nevertheless, Isabel went on in a moment—     45   
  “Why are you going to the convent?”     46   
  “Because papa thinks it best. He says a young girl is better, every now and then, for making a little retreat. He says the world, always the world, is very bad for a young girl. This is just a chance for a little seclusion—a little reflection.” Pansy spoke in short detached sentences, as if she could not trust herself. And then she added, with a triumph of self-control—“I think papa is right; I have been so much in the world this winter.”     47   
  Her announcement had a strange effect upon Isabel; it seemed to carry a larger meaning than the girl herself knew.     48   
  “When was this decided?” she asked. “I have heard nothing of it.”     49   
  “Papa told me half-an-hour ago; he thought it better it shouldn’t be too much talked about in advance. Madame Catherine is to come for me at a quarter past seven, and I am only to take two dresses. It is only for a few weeks; I am sure it will be very good. I shall find all those ladies who used to be so kind to me, and I shall see the little girls who are being educated. I am very fond of little girls,” said Pansy, with a sort of diminutive grandeur. “And I am also very fond of Mother Catherine. I shall be very quiet, and think a great deal.”     50   
  Isabel listened to her, holding her breath; she was almost awe-struck.     51   
  “Think of me, sometimes,” she said.     52   
  “Ah, come and see me soon!” cried Pansy; and the cry was very different from the heroic remarks of which she had just delivered herself.     53   
  Isabel could say nothing more; she understood nothing; she only felt that she did not know her husband yet. Her answer to Pansy was a long tender kiss.     54   
  Half-an-hour later she learned from her maid that Madame Catherine had arrived in a cab, and had departed again with the Signorina. On going to the drawing-room before dinner she found the Countess Gemini alone, and this lady characterised the incident by exclaiming, with a wonderful toss of the head—“En voilà, ma chère, une pose!” But if it was an affectation, she was at a loss to see what her husband affected. She could only dimly perceive that he had more traditions than she supposed. It had become her habit to be so careful as to what she said to him that, strange as it may appear, she hesitated, for several minutes after he had come in, to allude to his daughter’s sudden departure; she spoke of it only after they were seated at table. But she had forbidden herself ever to ask Osmond a question. All she could do was to make a declaration, and there was one that came very naturally.     55   
  “I shall miss Pansy very much.”     56   
  Osmond looked a while, with his head inclined a little, at the basket of flowers in the middle of the table.     57   
  “Ah, yes,” he said at last, “I had thought of that. You must go and see her, you know; but not too often. I dare say you wonder why I sent her to the good sisters; but I doubt whether I can make you understand. It doesn’t matter; don’t trouble yourself about it. That’s why I had not spoken of it. I didn’t believe you would enter into it. But I have always had the idea; I have always thought it a part of the education of a young girl. A young girl should be fresh and fair; she should be innocent and gentle. With the manners of the present time she is liable to become so dusty and crumpled! Pansy is a little dusty, a little dishevelled; she has knocked about too much. This bustling, pushing rabble, that calls itself society—one should take her out of it occasionally. Convents are very quiet, very convenient, very salutary. I like to think of her there, in the old garden, under the arcade, among those tranquil, virtuous women. Many of them are gentlewomen born; several of them are noble. She will have her books and her drawing; she will have her piano. I have made the most liberal arrangements. There is to be nothing ascetic; there is just to be a certain little feeling. She will have time to think, and there is something I want her to think about.” Osmond spoke deliberately, reasonably, still with his head on one side, as if he were looking at the basket of flowers. His tone, however, was that of a man not so much offering an explanation as putting a thing into words—almost into pictures—to see, himself, how it would look. He contemplated a while the picture he had evoked, and seemed greatly pleased with it. And then he went on—“The Catholics are very wise, after all. The convent is a great institution; we can’t do without it; it corresponds to an essential need in families, in society. It’s a school of good manners; it’s a school of repose. Oh, I don’t want to detach my daughter from the world,” he added; “I don’t want to make her fix her thoughts on the other one. This one is very well, after all, and she may think of it as much as she chooses. Only she must think of it as much as she chooses. Only she must think of it in the right way.”     58   
  Isabel gave an extreme attention to this little sketch; she found it indeed intensely interesting. It seemed to show her how far her husband’s desire to be effective was capable of going—to the point of playing picturesque tricks upon the delicate organism of his daughter. She could not understand his purpose, no—not wholly; but she understood it better than he supposed or desired, inasmuch as she was convinced that the whole proceeding was an elaborate mystification, addressed to herself and destined to act upon her imagination. He wished to do something sudden and arbitrary, something unexpected and refined; to mark the difference between his sympathies and her own, and to show that if he regarded his daughter as a precious work of art, it was natural he should be more and more careful about the finishing touches. If he wished to be effective he had succeeded; the incident struck a chill into Isabel’s heart. Pansy had known the convent in her childhood and had found a happy home there; she was fond of the good sisters, who were very fond of her, and there was therefore, for the moment, no definite hardship in her lot. But all the same, the girl had taken fright; the impression her father wanted to make would evidently be sharp enough. The old Protestant tradition had never faded from Isabel’s imagination, and as her thoughts attached themselves to this striking example of her husband’s genius—she sat looking, like him, at the basket of flowers—poor little Pansy became the heroine of a tragedy. Osmond wished it to be known that he shrank from nothing, and Isabel found it hard to pretend to eat her dinner. There was a certain relief, presently, in hearing the high, bright voice of her sister-in-law. The Countess, too, apparently, had been thinking the thing out; but she had arrived at a different conclusion from Isabel.     59   
  “It is very absurd, my dear Osmond,” she said, “to invent so many pretty reasons for poor Pansy’s banishment. Why don’t you say at once that you want to get her out of my way? Haven’t you discovered that I think very well of Mr. Rosier? I do indeed; he seems to me a delightful young man. He has made me believe in true love; I never did before! Of course you have made up your mind that with those convictions I am dreadful company for Pansy.”     60   
  Osmond took a sip of a glass of wine; he looked perfectly good-humoured.     61   
  “My dear Amy,” he answered, smiling as if he were uttering a piece of gallantry, “I don’t know anything about your convictions, but if I suspected that they interfere with mine it would be much simpler to banish you.”

Chapter LI   
     
THE COUNTESS was not banished, but she felt the insecurity of her tenure of her brother’s hospitality. A week after this incident Isabel received a telegram from England, dated from Gardencourt, and bearing the stamp of Mrs. Touchett’s authorship. “Ralph cannot last many days,” it ran, “and if convenient would like to see you. Wishes me to say that you must come only if you have not other duties. Say, for myself, that you used to talk a good deal about your duty and to wonder what it was; shall be curious to see whether you have found it out. Ralph is dying, and there is no other company.” Isabel was prepared for this news, having received from Henrietta Stackpole a detailed account of her journey to England with her appreciative patient.      1   
  Ralph had arrived more dead than alive, but she had managed to convey him to Gardencourt, where he had taken to his bed, which, as Miss Stackpole wrote, he evidently would never leave again. “I like him much better sick than when he used to be well,” said Henrietta, who, it will be remembered, had taken a few years before a sceptical view of Ralph’s disabilities. She added that she had really had two patients on her hands instead of one, for that Mr. Goodwood, who had been of no earthly use, was quite as sick, in a different way, as Mr. Touchett. Afterwards she wrote that she had been obliged to surrender the field to Mrs. Touchett, who had just returned from America, and had promptly given her to understand that she didn’t wish any interviewing at Gardencourt. Isabel had written to her aunt shortly after Ralph came to Rome, letting her know of his critical condition, and suggesting that she should lose no time in returning to Europe. Mrs. Touchett had telegraphed an acknowledgment of this admonition, and the only further news Isabel received from her was the second telegram which I have just quoted.      2   
  Isabel stood a moment looking at the latter missive, then, thrusting it into her pocket, she went straight to the door of her husband’s study. Here she again paused an instant, after which she opened the door and went in. Osmond was seated at the table near the window with a folio volume before him, propped against a pile of books. This volume was open at a page of small coloured plates, and Isabel presently saw that he had been copying from it the drawing of an antique coin. A box of water-colours and fine brushes lay before him, and he had already transferred to a sheet of immaculate paper the delicate, finely-tinted disk. His back was turned toward the door, but without looking round he recognised his wife.      3   
  “Excuse me for disturbing you,” she said.      4   
  “When I come to your room I always knock,” he answered, going on with his work.      5   
  “I forgot; I had something else to think of. My cousin is dying.”      6   
  “Ah, I don’t believe that,” said Osmond, looking at his drawing through a magnifying glass. “He was dying when we married; he will outlive us all.”      7   
  Isabel gave herself no time, no thought, to appreciate the careful cynicism of this declaration; she simply went on quickly, full of her own intention—      8   
  “My aunt has telegraphed for me; I must go to Gardencourt.”      9   
  “Why must you go to Gardencourt?” Osmond asked, in the tone of impartial curiosity.     10   
  “To see Ralph before he dies.”     11   
  To this, for some time, Osmond made no rejoinder; he continued to give his chief attention to his work, which was of a sort that would brook no negligence.     12   
  “I don’t see the need of it,” he said at last. “He came to see you here. I didn’t like that; I thought his being in Rome a great mistake. But I tolerated it, because it was to be the last time you should see him. Now you tell me it is not to have been the last. Ah, you are not grateful!”     13   
  “What am I to be grateful for?”     14   
  Gilbert Osmond laid down his little implements, blew a speck of dust from his drawing, slowly got up, and for the first time looked at his wife.     15   
  “For my not having interfered while he was here.”     16   
  “Oh yes, I am. I remember perfectly how distinctly you let me know you didn’t like it. I was very glad when he went away.”     17   
  “Leave him alone then. Don’t run after him.”     18   
  Isabel turned her eyes away from him; they rested upon his little drawing.     19   
  “I must go to England,” she said, with a full consciousness that her tone might strike an irritable man of taste as stupidly obstinate.     20   
  “I shall not like it if you do,” Osmond remarked.     21   
  “Why should I mind that? You won’t like it if I don’t. You like nothing I do or don’t do. You pretend to think I lie.”     22   
  Osmond turned slightly pale; he gave a cold smile.     23   
  “That’s why you must go then? Not to see your cousin, but to take a revenge on me.”     24   
  “I know nothing about revenge.”     25   
  “I do,” said Osmond. “Don’t give me an occasion.”     26   
  “You are only too eager to take one. You wish immensely that I would commit some folly.”     27   
  “I shall be gratified then if you disobey me.”     28   
  “If I disobey you?” said Isabel, in a low tone, which had the effect of gentleness.     29   
  “Let it be clear. If you leave Rome to-day it will be a piece of the most deliberate, the most calculated, opposition.”     30   
  “How can you call it calculated? I received my aunt’s telegram but three minutes ago.”     31   
  “You calculate rapidly; it’s a great accomplishment. I don’t see why we should prolong our discussion; you know my wish.” And he stood there as if he expected to see her withdraw.     32   
  But she never moved; she couldn’t move, strange as it may seem; she still wished to justify herself; he had the power, in an extraordinary degree, of making her feel this need. There was something in her imagination that he could always appeal to against her judgment.     33   
  “You have no reason for such a wish,” said Isabel, “and I have every reason for going. I can’t tell you how unjust you seem to me. But I think you know. It is your own opposition that is calculated. It is malignant.”     34   
  She had never uttered her worst thought to her husband before, and the sensation of hearing it was evidently new to Osmond. But he showed no surprise, and his coolness was apparently a proof that he had believed his wife would in fact be unable to resist for ever his ingenious endeavour to draw her out.     35   
  “It is all the more intense, then,” he answered. And he added, almost as if he were giving her a friendly counsel—“This is a very important matter.” She recognised this; she was fully conscious of the weight of the occasion; she knew that between them they had arrived at a crisis. Its gravity made her careful; she said nothing, and he went on. “You say I have no reason? I have the very best. I dislike, from the bottom of my soul, what you intend to do. It’s dishonourable; it’s indelicate; it’s indecent. Your cousin is nothing whatever to me, and I am under no obligation to make concessions to him. I have already made the very handsomest. Your relations with him, while he was here, kept me on pins and needles; but I let that pass, because from week to week I expected him to go. I have never liked him and he has never liked me. That’s why you like him—because he hates me,” said Osmond, with a quick, barely audible tremor in his voice. “I have an ideal of what my wife should do and should not do. She should not travel across Europe alone, in defiance of my deepest desire, to sit at the bedside of other men. Your cousin is nothing to you; he is nothing to us. You smile most expressively when I talk about us; but I assure you that we, we, is all that I know. I take our marriage seriously; you appear to have found a way of not doing so. I am not aware that we are divorced or separated; for me we are indissolubly united. you are nearer to me than any human creature, and I am nearer to you. It may be a disagreeable proximity; it’s one, at any rate, of our own deliberate making. You don’t like to be reminded of that, I know; but I am perfectly willing, because—because—” And Osmond paused a moment, looking as if he had something to say which would be very much to the point. “Because I think we should accept the consequences of our actions, and what I value most in life is the honour of a thing!”     36   
  He spoke gravely and almost gently; the accent of sarcasm had dropped out of his tone. It had a gravity which checked his wife’s quick emotion; the resolution with which she had entered the room found itself caught in a mesh of fine threads. His last words were not a command, they constituted a kind of appeal; and though she felt that any expression of respect on Osmond’s part could only be a refinement of egotism, they represented something transcendent and absolute, like the sign of the cross or the flag of one’s country. He spoke in the name of something sacred and precious—the observance of a magnificent form. They were as perfectly apart in feeling as two disillusioned lovers had ever been; but they had never yet separated in act. Isabel had not changed; her old passion for justice still abode within her; and now, in the very thick of her sense of her husband’s blasphemous sophistry, it began to throb to a tune which for a moment promised him the victory. It came over her that in his wish to preserve appearances he was after all sincere, and that this, as far as it went, was a merit. Ten minutes before, she had felt all the joy of irreflective action—a joy to which she had so long been a stranger; but action had been suddenly changed to slow renunciation, transformed by the blight of her husband’s touch. If she must renounce, however, she would let him know that she was a victim rather than a dupe. “I know you are a master of the art of mockery,” she said. “How can you speak of an indissoluble union—how can you speak of your being contented? Where is our union when you accuse me of falsity? Where is your contentment when you have nothing but hideous suspicion in your heart?”     37   
  “It is in our living decently together, in spite of such drawbacks.”     38   
  “We don’t live decently together!” Isabel cried.     39   
  “Indeed we don’t, if you go to England.”     40   
  “That’s very little; that’s nothing. I might do much more.”     41   
  Osmond raised his eyebrows and even his shoulders a little; he had lived long enough in Italy to catch this trick. “Ah, if you have come to threaten me, I prefer my drawing,” he said, walking back to his table, where he took up the sheet of paper on which he had been working and stood a moment examining his work.     42   
  “I suppose that if I go you will not expect me to come back,” said Isabel.     43   
  He turned quickly round, and she could see that this movement at least was not studied. He looked at her a little, and then—” Are you out of your mind?” he inquired.     44   
  “How can it be anything but a rupture?” she went on; “especially if all you say is true?” She was unable to see how it could be anything but a rupture; she sincerely wished to know what else it might be.     45   
  Osmond sat down before his table. “I really can’t argue with you on the hypothesis of your defying me,” he said. And he took up one of his little brushes again.     46   
  Isabel lingered but a moment longer; long enough to embrace with her eye his whole deliberately indifferent, yet most expressive, figure; after which she quickly left the room. Her faculties, her energy, her passion, were all dispersed again; she felt as if a cold, dark mist had suddenly encompassed her. Osmond possessed in a supreme degree the art of eliciting one’s weakness.     47   
  On her way back to her room she found the Countess Gemini standing in the open doorway of a little parlour in which a small collection of heterogeneous books had been arranged. The Countess had an open volume in her hand; she appeared to have been glancing down a page which failed to strike her as interesting. At the sound of Isabel’s step she raised her head.     48   
  “Ah my dear,” she said, “you, who are so literary, do tell me some amusing book to read! Everything here is so fearfully edifying. Do you think this would do me any good?”     49   
  Isabel glanced at the title of the volume she held out, but without reading or understanding it. “I am afraid I can’t advise you. I have had bad news. My cousin, Ralph Touchett, is dying.”     50   
  The Countess threw down her book. “Ah, he was so nice! I am sorry for you,” she said.     51   
  “You would be sorrier still if you knew.”     52   
  “What is there to know? You look very badly,” the Countess added. “You must have been with Osmond.”     53   
  Half-an-hour before, Isabel would have listened very coldly to an intimation that she should ever feel a desire for the sympathy of her sister-in-law, and there can be no better proof of her present embarrassment than the fact that she almost clutched at this lady’s fluttering attention. “I have been with Osmond,” she said, while the Countess’s bright eyes glittered at her.     54   
  “I am sure he has been odious!” the Countess cried. “Did he say he was glad poor Mr. Touchett is dying?”     55   
  “He said it is impossible I should go to England.”     56   
  The Countess’s mind, when her interests were concerned, was agile; she already foresaw the extinction of any further brightness in her visit to Rome. Ralph Touchett would die, Isabel would go into mourning, and then there would be no more dinner-parties. Such a prospect produced for a moment in her countenance an expressive grimace; but this rapid, picturesque play of feature was her only tribute to disappointment. After all, she reflected, the game was almost played out; she had already overstayed her invitation. And she cared enough for Isabel’s trouble to forget her own, and she saw that Isabel’s trouble was deep. It seemed deeper than the mere death of a cousin, and the Countess had no hesitation in connecting her exasperating brother with the expression of her sister-in-law’s eyes. Her heart beat with an almost joyous expectation; for if she had wished to see Osmond overtopped, the conditions looked favourable now. Of course, if Isabel should go to England, she herself would immediately leave the Palazzo Roccanera; nothing would induce her to remain there with Osmond. Nevertheless she felt an immense desire to hear that Isabel would go to England. “Nothing is impossible for you, my dear,” she said, caressingly. “Why else are you rich and clever and good?”     57   
  “Why indeed? I feel stupidly weak.”     58   
  “Why does Osmond say it’s impossible?” the Countess asked, in a tone which sufficiently declared that she couldn’t imagine.     59   
  From the moment that she began to question her however, Isabel drew back; she disengaged her hand, which the Countess had affectionately taken. But she answered this inquiry with frank bitterness. “Because we are so happy together that we cannot separate even for a fortnight.”     60   
  “Ah,” cried the Countess, while Isabel turned away; “when I want to make a journey my husband simply tells me I can have no money!”     61   
  Isabel went to her room, where she walked up and down for an hour. It may seem to some readers that she took things very hard, and it is certain that for a woman of a high spirit she had allowed herself easily to be arrested. It seemed to her that only now she fully measured the great undertaking of matrimony. Marriage meant that in such a case as this, when one had to choose, one chose as a matter of course for one’s husband. “I am afraid—yes, I am afraid,” she said to herself more than once, stopping short in her walk. But what she was afraid of was not her husband—his displeasure, his hatred, his revenge; it was not even her own later judgment of her conduct—a consideration which had often held her in check; it was simply the violence there would be in going when Osmond wished her to remain. A gulf of difference had opened between them, but nevertheless it was his desire that she should stay, it was a horror to him that she should go. She knew the nervous fineness with which he could feel an objection. What he thought of her she knew; what he was capable of saying to her she had felt; yet they were married, for all that, and marriage meant that a woman should abide with her husband. She sank down on her sofa at last, and buried her head in a pile of cushions.     62   
  When she raised her head again, the Countess Gemini stood before her. She had come in noiselessly, unperceived; she had a strange smile on her thin lips, and a still stranger glitter in her small dark eyes.     63   
  “I knocked,” she said, “but you didn’t answer me. So I ventured in. I have been looking at you for the last five minutes. You are very unhappy.”     64   
  “Yes; but I don’t think you can comfort me.”     65   
  “Will you give me leave to try?” And the Countess sat down on the sofa beside her. She continued to smile, and there was something communicative and exultant in her expression. She appeared to have something to say, and it occurred to Isabel for the first time that her sister-in-law might say something important. She fixed her brilliant eyes upon Isabel, who found at last a disagreeable fascination in her gaze. “After all,” the Countess went on, “I must tell you, to begin with, that I don’t understand your state of mind. You seem to have so many scruples, so many reasons, so many ties. When I discovered, ten years ago, that my husband’s dearest wish was to make me miserable—of late he has simply let me alone—ah, it was a wonderful simplification! My poor Isabel, you are not simple enough.”     66   
  “No, I am not simple enough,” said Isabel.     67   
  “There is something I want you to know,” the Countess declared—“because I think you ought to know it. Perhaps you do; perhaps you have guessed it. But if you have, all I can say is that I understand still less why you shouldn’t do as you like.”     68   
  “When do you wish me to know?” Isabel felt a foreboding which made her heart beat. The Countess was about to justify herself, and this alone was portentous.     69   
  But the Countess seemed disposed to play a little with her subject. “In your place I should have guessed it ages ago. Have you never really suspected?”     70   
  “I have guessed nothing. What should I have suspected? I don’t know what you mean.”     71   
  “That’s because you have got such a pure mind. I never saw a woman with such a pure mind!” cried the Countess.     72   
  Isabel slowly got up. “You are going to tell me something horrible.”     73   
  “You can call it by whatever name you will!” And the Countess rose also, while the sharp animation of her bright, capricious face emitted a kind of flash. She stood a moment looking at Isabel, and then she said—“My first sister-in-law had no children!”     74   
  Isabel stared back at her; the announcement was an anticlimax. “Your first sister-in-law?” she murmured.     75   
  I suppose you know that Osmond has been married before? I have never spoken to you of his wife; I didn’t suppose it was proper. But others, less particular, must have done so. The poor little woman lived but two years and died childless. It was after her death that Pansy made her appearance.”     76   
  Isabel’s brow had gathered itself into a frown; her lips were parted in pale, vague wonder. She was trying to follow; there seemed to be more to follow than she could see. “Pansy is not my husband’s child, then?”     77   
  “Your husband’s—in perfection! But no one else’s husband’s. Some one else’s wife’s. Ah, my good Isabel,” cried the Countess, “with you one must dot one’s i’s!”     78   
  “I don’t understand; whose wife’s?” said Isabel.     79   
  “The wife of a horrid little Swiss, who died twelve years ago. He never recognised Miss Pansy, and there was no reason he should. Osmond did, and that was better.”     80   
  Isabel stayed the name which rose in a sudden question to her lips; she sank down on her seat again, hanging her head. “Why have you told me this?” she asked, in a voice which the Countess hardly recognised.     81   
  “Because I was so tired of your not knowing! I was tired of not having told you. It seemed to me so dull. It’s not a lie, you know; it’s exactly as I say.”     82   
  “I never knew,” said Isabel, looking up at her, simply.     83   
  “So I believed—though it was hard to believe. Has it never occurred to you that he has been her lover?”     84   
  “I don’t know. Something has occurred to me. Perhaps it was that.”     85   
  “She has been wonderfully clever about Pansy!” cried the Countess.     86   
  “That thing has never occurred to me,” said Isabel. “And as it is—I don’t understand.”     87   
  She spoke in a low, thoughtful tone, and the poor Countess was equally surprised and disappointed at the effect of her revelation. She had expected to kindle a conflagration, and as yet she had barely extracted a spark. Isabel seemed more awe-stricken than anything else.     88   
  “Don’t you perceive that the child could never pass for her husband’s?” the Countess asked. “They have been separated too long for that, and M. Merle had gone to some far country; I think to South America. If she had ever had children—which I am not sure of—she had lost them. On the other hand, circumstances made it convenient enough for Osmond to acknowledge the little girl. His wife was dead—very true; but she had only been dead a year, and what was more natural than that she should have left behind a pledge of their affection? With the aid of a change of residence—he had been living at Naples, and he left it for ever—the little fable was easily set going. My poor sister-in-law, who was in her grave, couldn’t help herself, and the real mother, to save her reputation, renounced all visible property in the child.”     89   
  “Ah, poor creature!” cried Isabel, bursting into tears. It was a long time since she had shed any; she had suffered a reaction from weeping. But now they gushed with an abundance in which the Countess Gemini found only another discomfiture.     90   
  “It’s very kind of you to pity her!” she cried with a discordant laugh. “Yes, indeed, you have a pure mind!”     91   
  “He must have been false to his wife,” said Isabel, suddenly controlling herself.     92   
  “That’s all that’s wanting—that you should take up her cause!” the Countess went on.     93   
  “But to me—to me—” And Isabel hesitated, though there was a question in her eyes.     94   
  “To you he has been faithful? It depends upon what you call faithful. When he married you, he was no longer the lover of another woman. That state of things had passed away; the lady had repented; and she had a worship of appearances so intense that even Osmond himself got tired of it. You may therefore imagine what it was! But the whole past was between them.”     95   
  “Yes,” said Isabel, “the whole past is between them.”     96   
  “Ah, this later past is nothing. But for five years they were very intimate.”     97   
  “Why then did she want him to marry me?”     98   
  “Ah, my dear, that’s her superiority! Because you had money; and because she thought you would be good to Pansy.”     99   
  “Poor woman—and Pansy who doesn’t like her!” cried Isabel.    100   
  “That’s the reason she wanted some one whom Pansy would like. She knows it; she knows everything.”    101   
  “Will she know that you have told me this?”    102   
  “That will depend upon whether you tell her. She is prepared for it, and do you know what she counts upon for her defence? On your thinking that I lie. Perhaps you do; don’t make yourself uncomfortable to hide it. Only, as it happens this time, I don’t. I have told little fibs; but they have never hurt any one by myself.”    103   
  Isabel sat staring at her companion’s story as at a bale of fantastic wares that some strolling gipsy might have unpacked on the carpet at her feet. “Why did Osmond never marry her?” she asked, at last.    104   
  “Because she had no money.” The Countess had an answer for everything, and if she lied she lied well. “No one knows, no one has ever known, what she lives on, or how she has got all those beautiful things. I don’t believe Osmond himself knows. Besides, she wouldn’t have married him.”    105   
  “How can she have loved him then?”    106   
  “She doesn’t love him, in that way. She did at first, and then, I suppose, she would have married him; but at that time her husband was living. By the time M. Merle had rejoined—I won’t say his ancestors, because he never had any—her relations with Osmond had changed, and she had grown more ambitious. She hoped she might marry a great man; that has always been her idea. She has waited and watched and plotted and prayed; but she has never succeeded. I don’t call Madame Merle a success, you know. I don’t know what she may accomplish yet, but at present she has very little to show. The only tangible result she has ever achieved—except, of course, getting to know every one and staying with them free of expense—has been her bringing you and Osmond together. Oh, she did that, my dear; you needn’t look as if you doubted it. I have watched them for years; I know everything—everything. I am thought a great scatterbrain, but I have had enough application of mind to follow up those two. She hates me, and her way of showing it is to pretend to be for ever defending me. When people say I have had fifteen lovers, she looks horrified, and declares that quite half of them were never proved. She has been afraid of me for years, and she has taken great comfort in the vile, false things that people have said about me. She has been afraid I would expose her, and she threatened me one day, when Osmond began to pay his court to you. It was at his house in Florence; do you remember that afternoon when she brought you there and we had tea in the garden? She let me know then that if I should tell tales, two could play at that game. She pretends there is a good deal more to tell about me than about her. It would be an interesting comparison! I don’t care a fig what she may say, simply because I know you don’t care a fig. You can’t trouble your head about me less than you do already. So she may take her revenge as she chooses; I don’t think she will frighten you very much. Her great idea has been to be tremendously irreproachable—a kind of full-blown lily—the incarnation of propriety. She has always worshipped that god. There should be no scandal about Cæsar’s wife, you know; and, as I say, she has always hoped to marry Cæsar. That was one reason she wouldn’t marry Osmond; the fear that on seeing her with Pansy people would put things together—would even see a resemblance. She has had a terror lest the mother should betray herself. She has been awfully careful; the mother has never done so.”    107   
  “Yes, yes, the mother has done so,” said Isabel, who had listened to all this with a face of deepening dreariness. “She betrayed herself to me the other day, though I didn’t recognise her. There appeared to have been a chance of Pansy’s making a great marriage, and in her disappointment at its not coming off she almost dropped the mask.”    108   
  “Ah, that’s where she would stumble!” cried the Countess. “She has failed so dreadfully herself that she is determined her daughter shall make it up.”    109   
  Isabel started at the words “her daughter,” which the Countess threw off so familiarly. “It seems very wonderful,” she murmured; and in this bewildering impression she had almost lost her sense of being personally touched by the story.    110   
  “Now don’t go and turn against the poor innocent child!” the Countess went on. “She is very nice, in spite of her lamentable parentage. I have liked Pansy, not because she was hers—but because she had become yours.”    111   
  “Yes, she has become mine. And how the poor woman must have suffered at seeing me——!” Isabel exclaimed, flushing quickly at the thought.    112   
  “I don’t believe she has suffered; on the contrary, she has enjoyed. Osmond’s marriage has given Pansy a great life. Before that she lived in a hole. And do you know what the mother thought? That you might take such a fancy to the child that you would do something for her. Osmond, of course could never give her a portion. Osmond was really extremely poor; but of course you know all about that.—Ah, my dear,” cried the Countess, “why did you ever inherit money?” She stopped a moment, as if she saw something singular in Isabel’s face. “Don’t tell me now that you will give her a dowry. You are capable of that, but I shouldn’t believe it. Don’t try to be too good. Be a little wicked, feel a little wicked, for once in your life!”    113   
  “It’s very strange. I suppose I ought to know, but I am sorry,” Isabel said. “I am much obliged to you.”    114   
  “Yes, you seem to be!” cried the Countess, with a mocking laugh. “Perhaps you are—perhaps you are not. You don’t take it as I should have thought.”    115   
  “How should I take it?” Isabel asked.    116   
  “Well, I should say as a woman who has been made use of.” Isabel made no answer to this; she only listened, and the Countess went on. “They have always been bound to each other; they remained so even after she became proper. But he has always been more for her than she has been for him. When their little carnival was over they made a bargain that each should give the other complete liberty, but that each should also do everything possible to help the other on. You may ask me how I know such a thing as that. I know it by the way they have behaved. Now see how much better women are than men! She has found a wife for Osmond, but Osmond has never lifted a little finger for her. She has worked for him, plotted for him, suffered for him; she has even more than once found money for him; and the end of it is that he is tired of her. She is an old habit; there are moments when he needs her; but on the whole he wouldn’t miss her if she were removed. And, what’s more, to-day she knows it. So you needn’t be jealous!” the Countess added, humorously.    117   
  Isabel rose from her sofa again; she felt bruised and short of breath; her head was humming with new knowledge. “I am much obliged to you,” she repeated. And then she added, abruptly, in quite a different tone—“How do you know all this?”    118   
  This inquiry appeared to ruffle the Countess more than Isabel’s expression of gratitude pleased her. She gave her companion a bold stare, with which—“Let us assume that I have invented it!” she cried. She too, however, suddenly changed her tone, and, laying her hand on Isabel’s arm, said softly, with her sharp, bright smile—“Now will you give up your journey?”    119   
  Isabel started a little; she turned away. But she felt weak and in a moment had to lay her arm upon the mantel-shelf for support. She stood a minute so, and then upon her arm she dropped her dizzy head, with closed eyes and pale lips.    120   
  “I have done wrong to speak—I have made you ill!” the Countess cried.    121   
  “Ah, I must see Ralph!” Isabel murmured; not in resentment, not in the quick passion her companion had looked for; but in a tone of exquisite far-reaching sadness.

   
Chapter LII   
     
THERE was a train to Turin and Paris that evening; and after the Countess had left her, Isabel had a rapid and decisive conference with her maid, who was discreet, devoted, and active. After this, she thought (except of her journey) of only one thing. She must go and see Pansy; from her she could not turn away. She had not seen her yet, as Osmond had given her to understand that it was too soon to begin. She drove at five o’clock to a high door in a narrow street in the quarter of the Piazza Navona, and was admitted by the portress of the convent, a genial and obsequious person. Isabel had been at this institution before; she had come with Pansy to see the sisters. She knew they were good women, and she saw that the large rooms were clean and cheerful, and that the well-used garden had sun for winter and shade for spring. But she disliked the place, and it made her horribly sad; not for the world would she have spent a night there. It produced to-day more than before the impression of a well appointed prison; for it was not possible to pretend that Pansy was free to leave it. This innocent creature had been presented to her in a new and violent light, but the secondary effect of the revelation was to make Isabel reach out her hand to her.      1   
  The portress left her to wait in the parlour of the convent, while she went to make it known that there was a visitor for the dear young lady. The parlour was a vast, cold apartment, with new-looking furniture; a large clean stove of white porcelain, unlighted; a collection of wax-flowers, under glass; and a series of engravings from religious pictures on the walls. On the other occasion Isabel had thought it less like Rome than like Philadelphia; but to-day she made no reflections; the apartment only seemed to her very empty and very soundless. The portress returned at the end of some five minutes, ushering in another person. Isabel got up, expecting to see one of the ladies of the sisterhood; but to her extreme surprise she found herself confronted with Madame Merle. The effect was strange, for Madame Merle was already so present to her vision that her appearance in the flesh was a sort of reduplication. Isabel had been thinking all day of her falsity, her audacity, her ability, her probable suffering; and these dark things seemed to flash with a sudden light as she entered the room. Her being there at all was a kind of vivid proof. It made Isabel feel faint; if it had been necessary to speak on the spot, she would have been quite unable. But no such necessity was distinct to her; it seemed to her indeed that she had absolutely nothing to say to Madame Merle. In one’s relations with this lady, however, there were never any absolute necessities; she had a manner which carried off not only her own deficiencies, but those of other people. But she was different from usual; she came in slowly, behind the portress, and Isabel instantly perceived that she was not likely to depend upon her habitual resources. For her, too, the occasion was exceptional, and she had undertaken to treat it by the light of the moment. This gave her a peculiar gravity; she did not even pretend to smile, and though Isabel saw that she was more than ever playing a part, it seemed to her that on the whole the wonderful woman had never been so natural. She looked at Isabel from head to foot, but not harshly nor defiantly; with a cold gentleness rather, and an absence of any air of allusion to their last meeting. It was as if she had wished to mark a difference; she had been irritated then—she was reconciled now.      2   
  “You can leave us alone,” she said to the portress; “in five minutes this lady will ring for you.” And then she turned to Isabel, who, after noting what has just been mentioned, had ceased to look at her, and had let her eyes wander as far as the limits of the room would allow. She wished never to look at Madame Merle again. “You are surprised to find me here, and I am afraid you are not pleased,” this lady went on. “You don’t see why I should have come; it’s as if I had anticipated you. I confess I have been rather indiscreet—I ought to have asked your permission.” There was none of the oblique movement of irony in this; it was said simply and softly; but Isabel, far afloat on a sea of wonder and pain, could not have told herself with what intention it was uttered. “But I have not been sitting long,” Madame Merle continued; “that is, I have not been long with Pansy. I came to see her because it occurred to me this afternoon that she must be rather lonely, and perhaps even a little miserable. It may be good for a young girl; I know so little about young girls, I can’t tell. At any rate it’s a little dismal. Therefore I came—on the chance. I knew of course that you would come, and her father as well; still, I had not been told that other visitors were forbidden. The good woman—what’s her name? Madame Catherine—made no objection whatever. I stayed twenty minutes with Pansy; she has a charming little room, not in the least conventual, with a piano and flowers. She has arranged it delightfully; she has so much taste. Of course it’s all none of my business, but I feel happier since I have seen her. She may even have a maid if she likes; but of course she has no occasion to dress. She wears a little black dress; she looks so charming. I went afterwards to see Mother Catherine, who has a very good room too; I assure you I don’t find the poor sisters at all monastic. Mother Catherine has a most coquettish little toilet-table, with something that looked uncommonly like a bottle of eau-de-Cologne. She speaks delightfully of Pansy; says it’s a great happiness for them to have her. She is a little saint of heaven, and a model to the oldest of them. Just as I was leaving Madame Catherine, the portress came to say to her that there was a lady for the Signorina. Of course I knew it must be you, and I asked her to let me go and receive you in her place. She demurred greatly—I must tell you that—and said it was her duty to notify the Superior; it was of such high importance that you should be treated with respect. I requested her to let the poor Superior alone, and asked her how she supposed I would treat you!”      3   
  So Madame Merle went on, with much of the brilliancy of a woman who had long been a mistress of the art of conversation. But there were phases and gradations in her speech, not one of which was lost upon Isabel’s ear, though her eyes were absent from her companion’s face. She had not proceeded far before Isabel noted a sudden rupture in her voice, which was in itself a complete drama. This subtle modulation marked a momentous discovery—the perception of an entirely new attitude on the part of her listener. Madame Merle had guessed in the space of an instant that everything was at end between them, and in the space of another instant she had guessed the reason why. The person who stood there was not the same one she had seen hitherto; it was a very different person—a person who knew her secret. This discovery was tremendous, and for the moment she made it the most accomplished of women faltered and lost her courage. But only for that moment. Then the conscious stream of her perfect manner gathered itself again and flowed on as smoothly as might be to the end. But it was only because she had the end in view that she was able to go on. She had been touched with a point that made her quiver, and she needed all the alertness of her will to repress her agitation. Her only safety was in not betraying herself. She did not betray herself; but the startled quality of her voice refused to improve—she couldn’t help it—while she heard herself say she hardly knew what. The tide of her confidence ebbed, and she was able only just to glide into port, faintly grazing the bottom.      4   
  Isabel saw all this as distinctly as if it had been a picture on the wall. It might have been a great moment for her, for it might have been a moment of triumph. That Madame Merle had lost her pluck and saw before her the phantom of exposure—this in itself was a revenge, this in itself was almost a symptom of a brighter day. And for a moment while she stood apparently looking out of the window with her back half turned, Isabel enjoyed her knowledge. On the other side of the window lay the garden of the convent; but this is not what Isabel saw; she saw nothing of the budding plants and the glowing afternoon. She saw, in the crude light of that revelation which had already become a part of experience and to which the very frailty of the vessel in which it had been offered her only gave an intrinsic price, the dry, staring fact that she had been a dull un-reverenced tool. All the bitterness of this knowledge surged into her soul again; it was as if she felt on her lips the taste of dishonour. There was a moment during which, if she had turned and spoken, she would have said something that would hiss like a lash. But she closed her eyes, and then the hideous vision died away. What remained was the cleverest woman in the world, standing there within a few feet of her and knowing as little what to think as the meanest. Isabel’s only revenge was to be silent still—to leave Madame Merle in this unprecedented situation. She left her there for a period which must have seemed long to this lady, who at last seated herself with a movement which was in itself a confession of helplessness. Then Isabel turned her eyes and looked down at her. Madame Merle was very pale; her own eyes covered Isabel’s face. She might see what she would, but her danger was over. Isabel would never accuse her, never reproach her; perhaps because she never would give her the opportunity to defend herself.      5   
  “I am come to bid Pansy good-bye,” Isabel said at last. “I am going to England to-night.”      6   
  “Going to England to-night!” Madame Merle repeated, sitting there and looking up at her.      7   
  “I am going to Gardencourt. Ralph Touchett is dying.”      8   
  “Ah, you will feel that.” Madame Merle recovered herself; she had a chance to express sympathy. “Do you go alone?” she asked.      9   
  “Yes; without my husband.”     10   
  Madame Merle gave a low, vague murmur; a sort of recognition of the general sadness of things.     11   
  “Mr. Touchett never liked me; but I am sorry he is dying. Shall you see his mother?”     12   
  “Yes; she has returned from America.”     13   
  “She used to be very kind to me; but she has changed. Others, too, have changed,” said Madame Merle, with a quiet, noble pathos. She paused a moment, and then she said, “And you will see dear old Gardencourt again!”     14   
  “I shall not enjoy it much,” Isabel answered.     15   
  “Naturally—in your grief. But it is on the whole, of all the houses I know, and I know many, the one I should have liked best to live in. I don’t venture to send a message to the people,” Madame Merle added; “but I should like to give my love to the place.”     16   
  Isabel turned away.     17   
  “I had better go to Pansy,” she said. “I have not much time.”     18   
  And while she looked about her for the proper egress, the door opened and admitted one of the ladies of the house, who advanced with a discreet smile, gently rubbing, under her long loose sleeves, a pair of plump white hands. Isabel recognised her as Madame Catherine, whose acquaintance she had already made, and begged that she would immediately let her see Miss Osmond. Madame Catherine looked doubly discreet, but smiled very blandly and said—     19   
  “It will be good for her to see you. I will take you to her myself.” Then she directed her pleasant, cautious little eye towards Madame Merle.     20   
  “Will you let me remain a little?” this lady asked. “It is so good to be here.”     21   
  “You may remain always, if you like!” And the good sister gave a knowing laugh.     22   
  She led Isabel out of the room, through several corridors, and up a long staircase. All these departments were solid and bare, light and clean; so, thought Isabel, are the great penal establishments. Madame Catherine gently pushed open the door of Pansy’s room and ushered in the visitor; then stood smiling with folded hands, while the two others met and embraced.     23   
  “She is glad to see you,” she repeated; “it will do her good.” And she placed the best chair carefully for Isabel. But she made no movement to seat herself; she seemed ready to retire. “How does this dear child look?” she asked of Isabel, lingering a moment.     24   
  “She looks pale,” Isabel answered.     25   
  “That is the pleasure of seeing you. She is very happy. Elle éclaire la maison,” said the good sister.     26   
  Pansy wore, as Madame Merle had said, a little black dress; it was perhaps this that made her look pale.     27   
  “They are very good to me—they think of everything!” she exclaimed, with all her customary eagerness to say something agreeable.     28   
  “We think of you always—you are a precious charge,” Madame Catherine remarked, in the tone of a woman with whom benevolence was a habit, and whose conception of duty was the acceptance of every care. It fell with a leaden weight upon Isabel’s ears; it seemed to represent the surrender of a personality, the authority of the Church.     29   
  When Madame Catherine had left them together, Pansy kneeled down before Isabel and hid her head in her step-mother’s lap. So she remained some moments, while Isabel gently stroked her hair. Then she got up, averting her face and looking about the room.     30   
  “Don’t you think I have arranged it well? I have everything I have at home.”     31   
  “It is very pretty; you are very comfortable.” Isabel scarcely knew what she could say to her. On the one hand she could not let her think she had come to pity her, and on the other it would be dull mockery to pretend to rejoice with her. So she simply added, after a moment, “I have come to bid you good-bye. I am going to England.”     32   
  Pansy’s white little face turned red.     33   
  “To England! Not to come back?”     34   
  “I don’t know when I shall come back.”     35   
  “Ah; I’m sorry,” said Pansy, faintly. She spoke as if she had no right to criticise; but her tone expressed a depth of disappointment.     36   
  “My cousin, Mr. Touchett, is very ill; he will probably die. I wish to see him,” Isabel said.     37   
  “Ah, yes; you told me he would die. Of course you must go. And will papa go?”     38   
  “No; I shall go alone.”     39   
  For a moment, Pansy said nothing. Isabel had often wondered what she thought of the apparent relations of her father with his wife; but never by a glance, by an intimation, had she let it be seen that she deemed them deficient in the quality of intimacy. She made her reflections, Isabel was sure; and she must have had a conviction that there were husbands and wives who were more intimate than that. But Pansy was not indiscreet even in thought; she would as little have ventured to judge her gentle stepmother as to criticise her magnificent father. Her heart may almost have stood still, as it would have done if she had seen two of the saints in the great picture in the convent-chapel turn their painted heads and shake them at each other; but as in this latter case she would (for very solemnity’s sake), never have mentioned the awful phenomenon, so she put away all knowledge of the secrets of larger lives than her own.     40   
  “You will be very far away,” she said presently.     41   
  “Yes; I shall be far away. But it will scarcely matter,” Isabel answered; “for so long as you are here I am very far away from you.”     42   
  “Yes; but you can come and see me; though you have not come very often.”     43   
  “I have not come because your father forbade it. To-day I bring nothing with me. I can’t amuse you.”     44   
  “I am not to be amused. That’s not what papa wishes.”     45   
  “Then it hardly matters whether I am in Rome or in England.”     46   
  “You are not happy, Mrs. Osmond,” said Pansy.     47   
  “Not very. But it doesn’t matter.”     48   
  “That’s what I say to myself. What does it matter? But I should like to come out.”     49   
  “I wish indeed you might.”     50   
  “Don’t leave me here,” Pansy went on, gently.     51   
  Isabel was silent a moment; her heart beat fast.     52   
  “Will you come away with me now?” she asked.     53   
  Pansy looked at her pleadingly.     54   
  “Did papa tell you to bring me?”     55   
  “No; it’s my own proposal.”     56   
  “I think I had better wait, then. Did papa send me no message?”     57   
  “I don’t think he knew I was coming.”     58   
  “He thinks I have not had enough,” said Pansy. “But I have. The ladies are very kind to me, and the little girls come to see me. There are some very little ones—such charming children. Then my room—you can see for yourself. All that is very delightful. But I have had enough. Papa wished me to think a little—and I have thought a great deal.”     59   
  “What have you thought?”     60   
  “Well, that I must never displease papa.”     61   
  “You knew that before.”     62   
  “Yes; but I know it better. I will do anything—I will do anything,” said Pansy. Then, as she heard her own words, a deep, pure blush came into her face. Isabel read the meaning of it; she saw that the poor girl had been vanquished. It was well that Mr. Edward Rosier had kept his enamels! Isabel looked into her eyes and saw there mainly a prayer to be treated easily. She laid her hand on Pansy’s, as if to let her know that her look conveyed no diminution of esteem; for the collapse of the girl’s momentary resistance (mute and modest though it had been), seemed only her tribute to the truth of things. She didn’t presume to judge others, but she had judged herself; she had seen the reality. She had no vocation for struggling with combinations; in the solemnity of sequestration there was something that overwhelmed her.     63   
  She bowed her pretty head to authority, and only asked of authority to be merciful. Yes; it was very well that Edward Rosier had reserved a few articles!     64   
  Isabel got up; her time was rapidly shortening.     65   
  “Good-bye, then,” she said; “I leave Rome to-night.”     66   
  Pansy took hold of her dress; there was a sudden change. in the girl’s face.     67   
  “You look strange; you frighten me.”     68   
  “Oh, I am very harmless,” said Isabel.     69   
  “Perhaps you won’t come back?”     70   
  “Perhaps not. I can’t tell”     71   
  “Ah, Mrs. Osmond, you won’t leave me!”     72   
  Isabel now saw that she had guessed everything.     73   
  “My dear child, what can I do for you?” she asked.     74   
  “I don’t know—but I am happier when I think of you.”     75   
  “You can always think of me.”     76   
  “Not when you are so far. I am a little afraid,” said Pansy.     77   
  “What are you afraid of?”     78   
  “Of papa—a little. And of Madame Merle. She has just been to see me.”     79   
  “You must not say that,” Isabel observed.     80   
  “Oh, I will do everything they want. Only if you are here I shall do it more easily.”     81   
  Isabel reflected a little.     82   
  “I won’t desert you,” she said at last. “Good-bye, my child.”     83   
  Then they held each other a moment in a silent embrace, like two sisters; and afterwards Pansy walked along the corridor with her visitor to the top of the staircase.     84   
  “Madame Merle has been here,” Pansy remarked as they went; and as Isabel answered nothing she added, abruptly, “I don’t like Madame Merle!”     85   
  Isabel hesitated a moment; then she stopped.     86   
  “You must never say that—that you don’t like Madame Merle.”     87   
  Pansy looked at her in wonder; but wonder with Pansy had never been a reason for non-compliance.     88   
  “I never will again,” she said, with exquisite gentleness.     89   
  At the top of the staircase they had to separate, as it appeared to be part of the mild but very definite discipline under which Pansy lived that she should not go down. Isabel descended, and when she reached the bottom the girl was standing above.     90   
  “You will come back?” she called out in a voice that Isabel remembered afterwards.     91   
  “Yes—I will come back.”     92   
  Madame Catherine met Isabel below, and conducted her to the door of the parlour, outside of which the two stood talking a minute.     93   
  “I won’t go in,” said the good sister. “Madame Merle is waiting for you.”     94   
  At this announcement Isabel gave a start, and she was on the point of asking if there were no other egress from the convent. But a moment’s reflection assured her that she would do well not to betray to the worthy nun her desire to avoid Pansy’s other visitor. Her companion laid her hand very gently on her arm, and fixing her a moment with a wise, benevolent eye, said to her, speaking French, almost familiarly—     95   
  “Eh bien, chère Madame, qu’en pensez-vous?”     96   
  “About my step-daughter? Oh, it would take long to tell you.”     97   
  “We think it’s enough,” said Madame Catherine, significantly. And she pushed open the door of the parlour.     98   
  Madame Merle was sitting just as Isabel had left her, like a woman so absorbed in thought that she had not moved a little-finger. As Madame Catherine closed the door behind Isabel, she got up, and Isabel saw that she had been thinking to some purpose. She had recovered her balance; she was in full possession of her resources.     99   
  “I found that I wished to wait for you,” she said, urbanely. “But it’s not to talk about Pansy.”    100   
  Isabel wondered what it could be to talk about, and in spite of Madame Merle’s declaration she answered after a moment—    101   
  “Madame Catherine says it’s enough.”    102   
  “Yes; it also seems to me enough. I wanted to ask you another word about poor Mr. Touchett,” Madame Merle added. “Have you reason to believe that he is really at his last?”    103   
  “I have no information but a telegram. Unfortunately it only confirms a probability.”    104   
  “I am going to ask you a strange question,” said Madame Merle. “Are you very fond of your cousin?” And she gave a smile as strange as her question.    105   
  “Yes, I am very fond of him. But I don’t understand you.”    106   
  Madame Merle hesitated a moment.    107   
  “It is difficult to explain. Something has occurred to me which may not have occurred to you, and I give you the benefit of my idea. Your cousin did you once a great service. Have you never guessed it?”    108   
  “He has done me many services.”    109   
  “Yes; but one was much above the rest. He made you a rich woman.”    110   
  “He made me——?”    111   
  Madame Merle appeared to see herself successful, and she went on, more triumphantly—    112   
  “He imparted to you that extra lustre which was required to make you a brilliant match. At bottom, it is him that you have to thank.” She stopped; there was something in Isabel’s eyes.    113   
  “I don’t understand you. It was my uncle’s money.”    114   
  “Yes; it was your uncle’s money; but it was your cousin’s idea. He brought his father over to it. Ah, my dear, the sum was large!”    115   
  Isabel stood staring; she seemed to-day to be living in a world illumined by lurid flashes.    116   
  “I don’t know why you say such things! I don’t know what you know.”    117   
  “I know nothing but what I’ve guessed. But I have guessed that.”    118   
  Isabel went to the door, and when she had opened it stood a moment with her hand on the latch. Then she said—it was her only revenge—    119   
  “I believed it was you I had to thank!”    120   
  Madame Merle dropped her eyes; she stood there in a kind of proud penance.    121   
  “You are very unhappy, I know. But I am more so.”    122   
  “Yes; I can believe that. I think I should like never to see you again.”    123   
  Madame Merle raised her eyes.    124   
  “I shall go to America,” she announced, while Isabel passed out.

Chapter LIII   
     
IT was not with surprise, it was with a feeling which in other circumstances would have had much of the effect of joy, that as Isabel descended from the Paris mail at Charing Cross, she stepped into the arms, as it were—or at any rate into the hands—of Henrietta Stackpole. She had telegraphed to her friend from Turin, and though she had not definitely said to herself that Henrietta would meet her, she had felt that her telegram would produce some helpful result. On her long journey from Rome her mind had been given up to vagueness; she was unable to question the future. She performed this journey with sightless eyes, and took little pleasure in the countries she traversed, decked out through they were in the richest freshness of spring. Her thoughts followed their course through other countries—strange-looking, dimly-lighted, pathless lands, in which there was no change of seasons, but only, as it seemed, a perpetual dreariness of winter. She had plenty to think about; but it was not reflection, nor conscious purpose, that filled her mind. Disconnected visions passed through it, and sudden dull gleams of memory, of expectation. The past and the future alternated at their will, but she saw them only in fitful images, which came and went by a logic of their own. It was extraordinary the things she remembered. Now that she was in the secret, now that she knew something that so much concerned her, and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play whist with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness. She remembered a thousand trifles; they started to life with the spontaneity of a shiver. That is, she had thought them trifles at the time; now she saw that they were leaden-weighted. Yet even now they were trifles, after all; for of what use was it to her to understand them? Nothing seemed of use to her to-day. All purpose, all intention, was suspended; all desire, too, save the single desire to reach her richly-constituted refuge. Gardencourt had been her starting-point, and to those muffled chambers it was at least a temporary solution to return. She had gone forth in her strength; she would come back in her weakness, and if the place had been a rest to her before, it would be a positive sanctuary now. She envied Ralph his dying; for if one were thinking of rest, that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more—this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land. She had moments, indeed, in her journey from Rome, which were almost as good as being dead. She sat in her corner, so motionless, so passive, simply with the sense of being carried, so detached from hope and regret, that if her spirit was haunted with sudden pictures, it might have been the spirit disembarrassed of the flesh. There was nothing to regret now—that was all over. Not only the time of her folly, but the time of her repentance seemed far away. The only thing to regret was that Madame Merle had been so—so strange. Just here Isabel’s imagination paused, from literal inability to say what it was that Madame Merle had been. Whatever it was, it was for Madame Merle herself to regret it; and doubtless she would do so in America, where she was going. It concerned Isabel no more; she only had an impression that she should never again see Madame Merle. This impression carried her into the future, of which from time to time she had a mutilated glimpse. She saw herself, in the distant years, still in the attitude of a woman who had her life to live, and those intimations contradicted the spirit of the present hour. It might be desirable to die; but this privilege was evidently to be denied her. Deep in her soul—deeper than any appetite for renunciation—was the sense that life would be her business for a long time to come. And at moments there was something inspiring, almost exhilarating, in the conviction. It was a proof of strength—it was a proof that she should some day be happy again. It couldn’t be that she was to live only to suffer; she was still young, after all, and a great many things might happen to her yet. To live only to suffer—only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged—it seemed to her that she was too valuable, too capable, for that. Then she wondered whether it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. When had it ever been a guarantee to be valuable? Was not all history full of the destruction of precious things? Was it not much more probable that if one were delicate one would suffer? It involved then, perhaps, an admission that one had a certain grossness; but Isabel recognised, as it passed before her eyes, the quick, vague shadow of a long future. She should not escape; she should last. Then the middle years wrapped her about again, and the grey curtain of her indifference closed her in.      1   
  Henrietta kissed her, as Henrietta usually kissed, as if she were afraid she should be caught doing it; and then Isabel stood there in the crowd, looking about her, looking for her servant. She asked nothing; she wished to wait. She had a sudden perception that she should be helped. She was so glad Henrietta was there; there was something terrible in an arrival in London. The dusky, smoky, far-arching vault of the station, the strange, livid light, the dense, dark, pushing crowd, filled her with a nervous fear and made her put her arm into her friend’s. She remembered that she had once liked these things; they seemed part of a mighty spectacle, in which there was something that touched her. She remembered how she walked away from Euston, in the winter dusk, in the crowded streets, five years before. She could not have done that to-day, and the incident came before her as the deed of another person.      2   
  “It’s too beautiful that you should have come,” said Henrietta, looking at her as if she thought Isabel might be prepared to challenge the proposition. “If you hadn’t—if you hadn’t; well, I don’t know,” remarked Miss Stackpole, hinting ominously at her powers of disapproval.      3   
  Isabel looked about, without seeing her maid. Her eyes rested on another figure, however, which she felt that she had seen before; and in a moment she recognised the genial countenance of Mr. Bantling. He stood a little apart, and it was not in the power of the multitude that pressed about him to make him yield an inch of the ground he had taken—that of abstracting himself, discreetly, while the two ladies performed their embraces.      4   
  “There’s Mr. Bantling,” said Isabel, gently, irrelevantly, scarcely caring much now whether she should find her maid or not.      5   
  “Oh yes, he goes everywhere with me. Come here, Mr. Bantling!” Henrietta exclaimed. Whereupon the gallant bachelor advanced with a smile—a smile tempered, however, by the gravity of the occasion. “Isn’t it lovely that she has come?” Henrietta asked. “He knows all about it,” she added; “we had quite a discussion; he said you wouldn’t; I said you would.”      6   
  “I thought you always agreed,” Isabel answered, smiling. She found she could smile now; she had seen in an instant, in Mr. Bantling’s excellent eye, that he had good news for her. It seemed to say that he wished her to remember that he was an old friend of her cousin—that he understood—that it was all right. Isabel gave him her hand; she thought him so kind.      7   
  “Oh, I always agree,” said Mr. Bantling. “But she doesn’t, you know.”      8   
  “Didn’t I tell you that a maid was a nuisance?” Henrietta inquired. “Your young lady has probably remained at Calais.”      9   
  “I don’t care,” said Isabel, looking at Mr. Bantling, whom she had never thought so interesting.     10   
  “Stay with her while I go and see,” Henrietta commanded, leaving the two for a moment together.     11   
  They stood there at first in silence, and then Mr. Bantling asked Isabel how it had been on the Channel.     12   
  “Very fine. No, I think it was rather rough,” said Isabel, to her companion’s obvious surprise. After which she added, “You have been to Gardencourt, I know.”     13   
  “Now how do you know that?”     14   
  “I can’t tell you—except that you look like a person who has been there.”     15   
  “Do you think I look sad? It’s very sad there, you know.”     16   
  “I don’t believe you ever look sad. You look kind,” said Isabel, with a frankness that cost her no effort. It seemed to her that she should never again feel a superficial embarrassment.     17   
  Poor Mr. Bantling, however, was still in this inferior stage. He blushed a good deal, and laughed, and assured her that he was often very blue, and that when he was blue he was awfully fierce.     18   
  “You can ask Miss Stackpole, you know,” he said. “I was at Gardencourt two days ago.”     19   
  “Did you see my cousin?”     20   
  “Only for a little. But he had been seeing people; Warburton was there the day before. Touchett was just the same as usual, except that he was in bed, that he looks tremendously ill, and that he can’t speak,” Mr. Bantling pursued. “He was immensely friendly all the same. He was just as clever as ever. It’s awfully sad.”     21   
  Even in the crowded, noisy station this simple picture was vivid. “Was that late in the day?”     22   
  “Yes; I went on purpose; we thought you would like to know.”     23   
  “I am very much obliged to you. Can I go down tonight?”     24   
  “Ah, I don’t think she’ll let you go,” said Mr. Bantling. “She wants you to stop with her. I made Touchett’s man promise to telegraph me to-day, and I found the telegram an hour ago at my club. ‘Quiet and easy,’ that’s what it says, and it’s dated two o’clock. So you see you can wait till to-morrow. You must be very tired.”     25   
  “Yes, I am very tired. And I thank you again.”     26   
  “Oh,” said Mr. Bantling, “we were certain you would like the last news.” While Isabel vaguely noted that after all he and Henrietta seemed to agree.     27   
  Miss Stackpole came back with Isabel’s maid, whom she had caught in the act of proving her utility. This excellent person, instead of losing herself in the crowd, had simply attended to her mistress’s luggage, so that now Isabel was at liberty to leave the station.     28   
  “You know you are not to think of going to the country to-night,” Henrietta remarked to her. “It doesn’t matter whether there is a train or not. You are to come straight to me, in Wimpole Street. There isn’t a corner to be had in London, but I have got you one all the same. It isn’t a Roman palace, but it will do for a night.”     29   
  “I will do whatever you wish,” Isabel said.     30   
  “You will come and answer a few questions; that’s what I wish.”     31   
  “She doesn’t say anything about dinner, does she, Mrs. Osmond?” Mr. Bantling inquired jocosely.     32   
  Henrietta fixed him a moment with her speculative gaze. “I see you are in a great hurry to get to your own. You will be at the Paddington station to-morrow morning at ten.”     33   
  “Don’t come for my sake, Mr. Bantling,” said Isabel.     34   
  “He will come for mine,” Henrietta declared, as she ushered Isabel into a cab.     35   
  Later, in a large, dusky parlour in Wimpole Street—to do her justice, there had been dinner enough—she asked Isabel those questions to which she had alluded at the station.     36   
  “Did your husband make a scene about your coming?” That was Miss Stackpole’s first inquiry.     37   
  “No; I can’t say he made a scene.”     38   
  “He didn’t object then?”     39   
  “Yes; he objected very much. But it was not what you would call a scene.”     40   
  “What was it then?”     41   
  “It was a very quiet conversation.”     42   
  Henrietta for a moment contemplated her friend.     43   
  “It must have been awful,” she then remarked. And Isabel did not deny that it had been awful. But she confined herself to answering Henrietta’s questions, which was easy, as they were tolerably definite. For the present she offered her no new information. “Well,” said Miss Stackpole at last, “I have only one criticism to make. I don’t see why you promised little Miss Osmond to go back.”     44   
  “I am not sure that I see myself, now,” Isabel replied. “But I did then.”     45   
  “If you have forgotten your reason perhaps you won’t return.”     46   
  Isabel for a moment said nothing, then—     47   
  “Perhaps I shall find another,” she rejoined.     48   
  “You will certainly never find a good one.”     49   
  “In default of a better, my having promised will do,” Isabel suggested.     50   
  “Yes; that’s why I hate it.”     51   
  “Don’t speak of it now. I have a little time. Coming away was hard; but going back will be harder still.”     52   
  “You must remember, after all, that he won’t make a scene!” said Henrietta, with much intention.     53   
  “He will, though,” Isabel answered gravely. “It will not be the scene of a moment; it will be a scene that will last always.”     54   
  For some minutes the two women sat gazing at this prospect; and then Miss Stackpole, to change the subject, as Isabel had requested, announced abruptly—     55   
  “I have been to stay with Lady Pensil!”     56   
  “Ah, the letter came at last!”     57   
  “Yes; it took five years. But this time she wanted to see me.”     58   
  “Naturally enough.”     59   
  “It was more natural than I think you know,” said Henrietta, fixing her eyes on a distant point. And then she added, turning suddenly: “Isabel Archer, I beg your pardon. You don’t know why? Because I criticised you, and yet I have gone further than you. Mr. Osmond, at least, was born on the other side!”     60   
  It was a moment before Isabel perceived her meaning; it was so modestly, or at least so ingeniously, veiled. Isabel’s mind was not possessed at present with the comicality of things; but she greeted with a quick laugh the image that her companion had raised. She immediately recovered herself, however, and with a gravity too pathetic to be real—     61   
  “Henrietta Stackpole,” she asked, “are you going to give up your country?”     62   
  “Yes, my poor Isabel, I am. I won’t pretend to deny it; I look the fact in the face. I am going to marry Mr. Bantling, and I am going to reside in London.”     63   
  “It seems very strange,” said Isabel, smiling now.     64   
  “Well yes, I suppose it does. I have come to it little by little. I think I know what I am doing; but I don’t know that I can explain.”     65   
  “One can’t explain one’s marriage,” Isabel answered. “And yours doesn’t need to be explained. Mr. Bantling is very good.”     66   
  Henrietta said nothing; she seemed lost in reflection.     67   
  “He has a beautiful nature,” she remarked at last. “I have studied him for many years, and I see right through him. He’s as clear as glass—there’s no mystery about him. He is not intellectual, but he appreciates intellect. On the other hand, he doesn’t exaggerate its claims. I sometimes think we do in the United States.”     68   
  “Ah,” said Isabel, “you are changed indeed! It’s the first time I have ever heard you say anything against your native land.”     69   
  “I only say that we are too intellectual; that, after all, is a glorious fault. But I am changed; a woman has to change a good deal to marry.”     70   
  “I hope you will be very happy. You will at last—over here—see something of the inner life.”     71   
  Henrietta gave a little significant sigh. “That’s the key to the mystery, I believe. I couldn’t endure to be kept off. Now I have as good a right as any one!” she added, with artless elation.     72   
  Isabel was deeply diverted, but there was a certain melancholy in her view. Henrietta, after all, was human and feminine, Henrietta whom she had hitherto regarded as a light keen flame, a disembodied voice. It was rather a disappointment to find that she had personal susceptibilities, that she was subject to common passions, and that her intimacy with Mr. Bantling had not been completely original. There was a want of originality in her marrying him—there was even a kind of stupidity; and for a moment, to Isabel’s sense, the dreariness of the world took on a deeper tinge.     73   
  A little later, indeed, she reflected that Mr. Bantling, after all, was original. But she didn’t see how Henrietta could give up her country. She herself had relaxed her hold of it, but it had never been her country as it had been Henrietta’s. She presently asked her if she had enjoyed her visit to Lady Pensil.     74   
  “Oh, yes,” said Henrietta, “she didn’t know what to make of me.”     75   
  “And was that very enjoyable?”     76   
  “Very much so, because she is supposed to be very talented. She thinks she knows everything; but she doesn’t understand a lady-correspondent! It would be so much easier for her if I were only a little better or a little worse. She’s so puzzled; I believe she thinks it’s my duty to go and do something immoral. She thinks it’s immoral that I should marry her brother; but, after all, that isn’t immoral enough. And she will never understand—never!”     77   
  “She is not so intelligent as her brother, then,” said Isabel. “He appears to have understood.”     78   
  “Oh no, he hasn’t!” cried Miss Stackpole, with decision. “I really believe that’s what he wants to marry me for—just to find out. It’s a fixed idea—a kind of fascination.”     79   
  “It’s very good in you to humour it.”     80   
  “Oh well,” said Henrietta, “I have something to find out too!” And Isabel saw that she had not renounced an allegiance, but planned an attack. She was at last about to grapple in earnest with England.     81   
  Isabel also perceived, however, on the morrow, at the Paddington station, where she found herself, at two o’clock, in the company both of Miss Stackpole and Mr. Bantling, that the gentleman bore his perplexities lightly. If he had not found out everything, he had found out at least the great point—that Miss Stackpole would not be wanting in initiative. It was evident that in the selection of a wife he had been on his guard against this deficiency.     82   
  “Henrietta has told me, and I am very glad,” Isabel said, as she gave him her hand.     83   
  “I dare say you think it’s very odd,” Mr. Bantling replied, resting on his neat umbrella.     84   
  “Yes, I think it’s very odd.”     85   
  “You can’t think it’s so odd as I do. But I have always rather liked striking out a line,” said Mr. Bantling, serenely.

Chapter LIV   
     
ISABEL’S arrival at Gardencourt on this second occasion was even quieter than it had been on the first. Ralph Touchett kept but a small household, and to the new servants Mrs. Osmond was a stranger; so that Isabel, instead of being conducted to her own apartment; was coldly shown into the drawing-room, and left to wait while her name was carried up to her aunt. She waited a long time; Mrs. Touchett appeared to be in no hurry to come to her. She grew impatient at last; she grew nervous and even frightened. The day was dark and cold; the dusk was thick in the corners of the wide brown rooms. The house was perfectly still—a stillness that Isabel remembered; it had filled all the place for days before the death of her uncle. She left the drawing-room and wandered about—strolled into the library and along the gallery of pictures, where, in the deep silence, her footstep made an echo. Nothing was changed; she recognised everything that she had seen years before; it might have been only yesterday that she stood there. She reflected that things change but little, while people change so much, and she became aware that she was walking about as her aunt had done on the day that she came to see her in Albany. She was changed enough since then—that had been the beginning. It suddenly struck her that if her Aunt Lydia had not come that day in just that way and found her alone, everything might have been different. She might have had another life, and to-day she might have been a happier woman. She stopped in the gallery in front of a small picture—a beautiful and valuable Bonington—upon which her eyes rested for a long time. But she was not looking at the picture; she was wondering whether if her aunt had not come that day in Albany she would have married Caspar Goodwood.      1   
  Mrs. Touchett appeared at last, just after Isabel had returned to the big uninhabited drawing-room. She looked a good deal older, but her eye was as bright as ever and her head as erect; her thin lips seemed a repository of latent meanings. She wore a little grey dress, of the most undecorated fashion, and Isabel wondered, as she had wondered the first time, whether her remarkable kinswoman resembled more a queen-regent or the matron of a gaol. Her lips felt very thin indeed as Isabel kissed her.      2   
  “I have kept you waiting because I have been sitting with Ralph,” Mrs. Touchett said. “The nurse had gone to her lunch and I had taken her place. He has a man who is supposed to look after him, but the man is good for nothing; he is always looking out of the window—as if there were anything to see! I didn’t wish to move, because Ralph seemed to be sleeping, and I was afraid the sound would disturb him. I waited till the nurse came back; I remembered that you knew the house.”      3   
  “I find I know it better even than I thought; I have been walking,” Isabel answered. And then she asked whether Ralph slept much.      4   
  “He lies with his eyes closed; he doesn’t move. But I am not sure that it’s always sleep.”      5   
  “Will he see me? Can he speak to me?”      6   
  Mrs. Touchett hesitated a moment. “You can try him,” she said. And then she offered to conduct Isabel to her room. “I thought they had taken you there; but it’s not my house, it’s Ralph’s; and I don’t know what they do. They must at least have taken your luggage; I don’t suppose you have brought much. Not that I care, however. I believe they have given you the same room you had before; when Ralph heard you were coming he said you must have that one.”      7   
  “Did he say anything else?”      8   
  “Ah, my dear, he doesn’t chatter as he used!” cried Mrs. Touchett, as she preceded her niece up the staircase.      9   
  It was the same room, and something told Isabel that it had not been slept in since she occupied it. Her luggage was there, and it was not voluminous; Mrs. Touchett sat down a moment, with her eyes upon it.     10   
  “Is there really no hope?” Isabel asked, standing before her aunt.     11   
  “None whatever. There never has been. It has not been a successful life.”     12   
  “No—it has only been a beautiful one,” Isabel found herself already contradicting her aunt; she was irritated by her dryness.     13   
  “I don’t know what you mean by that; there is no beauty without health. That is a very odd dress to travel in.”     14   
  Isabel glanced at her garment. “I left Rome at an hour’s notice; I took the first that came.”     15   
  “Your sisters, in America, wished to know how you dress. That seemed to be their principal interest. I wasn’t able to tell them—but they seemed to have the right idea; that you never wear anything less than black brocade.”     16   
  “They think I am more brilliant than I am; I am afraid to tell them the truth,” said Isabel. “Lily wrote me that you had dined with her.”     17   
  “She invited me four times and I went once. After the second time she should have let me alone. The dinner was very good; it must have been expensive. Her husband has a very bad manner. Did I enjoy my visit to America? Why should I have enjoyed it? I didn’t go for my pleasure.”     18   
  These were interesting items, but Mrs. Touchett soon left her niece, whom she was to meet in half-an-hour at the midday meal. At this repast the two ladies faced each other at an abbreviated table in the melancholy dining-room. Here, after a little, Isabel saw that her aunt was not so dry as she appeared, and her old pity for the poor woman’s inexpressiveness, her want to regret, of disappointment, came back to her. It seemed to her she would find it a blessing to-day to be able to indulge a regret. She wondered whether Mrs. Touchett were not trying, whether she had not a desire for the recreation of grief. On the other hand, perhaps, she was afraid; if she began to regret, it might take her too far. Isabel could perceive, however, that it had come over her that she had missed something, that she saw herself in the future as an old woman without memories. Her little sharp face looked tragical. She told her niece that Ralph as yet had not moved, but that he probably would be able to see her before dinner. And then in moment she added that he had seen Lord Warburton the day before; an announcement which startled Isabel a little, as it seemed an intimation that this personage was in the neighbourhood and that an accident might bring them together. Such an accident would not be happy; she had not come to England to converse with Lord Warburton. She presently said to her aunt that he had been very kind to Ralph; she had seen something of that in Rome.     19   
  “He has something else to think of now,” Mrs. Touchett rejoined. And she paused, with a gaze like a gimlet.     20   
  Isabel saw that she meant something, and instantly guessed what she meant. But her reply concealed her guess; her heart beat faster, and she wished to gain a moment. “Ah yes—the House of Lords, and all that.”     21   
  “He is not thinking of the Lords; he is thinking of the ladies. At least he is thinking of one of them; he told Ralph he was engaged to be married.”     22   
  “Ah, to be married!” Isabel gently exclaimed.     23   
  “Unless he breaks it off. He seemed to think Ralph would like to know. Poor Ralph can’t go to the wedding, though I believe it is to take place very soon.”     24   
  “And who is the young lady?”     25   
  “A member of the aristocracy; Lady Flora, Lady Felicia—something of that sort.”     26   
  “I am very glad,” Isabel said. “It must be a sudden decision.”     27   
  “Sudden enough, I believe; a courtship of three weeks. It has only just been made public.”     28   
  “I am very glad,” Isabel repeated, with a larger emphasis. She knew her aunt was watching her—looking for the signs of some curious emotion, and the desire to prevent her companion from seeing anything of this kind enabled her to speak in the tone of quick satisfaction—the tone, almost, of relief. Mrs. Touchett of course followed the tradition that ladies, even married ones, regard the marriage of their old lovers as an offence to themselves. Isabel’s first care therefore was to show that however that might be in general, she was not offended now. But meanwhile, as I say, her heart beat faster; and if she sat for some moments thoughtful—she presently forgot Mrs. Touchett’s observation—it was not because she had lost an admirer. Her imagination had traversed half Europe; it halted, panting, and even trembling a little, in the city of Rome. She figured herself announcing to her husband that Lord Warburton was to lead a bride to the altar, and she was of course not aware how extremely sad she looked while she made this intellectual effort. But at last she collected herself, and said to her aunt—“He was sure to do it some time or other.”     29   
  Mrs. Touchett was silent; then she gave a sharp little shake of the head. “Ah, my dear, you’re beyond me!” she cried, suddenly. They went on with their luncheon in silence; Isabel felt as if she had heard of Lord Warburton’s death. She had known him only as a suitor, and now that was all over.     30   
  He was dead for poor Pansy; by Pansy he might have lived. A servant had been hovering about; at last Mrs. Touchett requested him to leave them alone. She had finished her lunch; she sat with her hands folded on the edge of the table. “I should like to ask you three questions,” she said to Isabel, when the servant had gone.     31   
  “Three are a great many.”     32   
  “I can’t do with less; I have been thinking. They are all very good ones.”     33   
  “That’s what I am afraid of. The best questions are the worst,” Isabel answered. Mrs. Touchett had pushed back her chair, and Isabel left the table and walked, rather consciously, to one of the deep windows, while her aunt followed her with her eyes.     34   
  “Have you ever been sorry you didn’t marry Lord Warburton?” Mrs. Touchett inquired.     35   
  Isabel shook her head slowly, smiling. “No, dear aunt.”     36   
  “Good. I ought to tell you that I propose to believe what you say.”     37   
  “Your believing me is an immense temptation,” Isabel replied, smiling still.     38   
  “A temptation to lie? I don’t recommend you to do that, for when I’m misinformed I’m as dangerous as a poisoned rat. I don’t mean to crow over you.”     39   
  “It is my husband that doesn’t get on with me,” said Isabel.     40   
  “I could have told him that. I don’t call that crowing over you,” Mrs. Touchett added. “Do you still like Serena Merle?” she went on.     41   
  “Not as I once did. But it doesn’t matter, for she is going to America.”     42   
  “To America? She must have done something very bad.”     43   
  “Yes—very bad.”     44   
  “May I ask what it is?”     45   
  “She made a convenience of me.”     46   
  “Ah,” cried Mrs. Touchett, “so she did of me! She does of every one.”     47   
  “She will make a convenience of America,” said Isabel, smiling again, and glad that her aunt’s questions were over.     48   
  It was not till the evening that she was able to see Ralph. He had been dozing all day; at least he had been lying unconscious. The doctor was there, but after a while he went away; the local doctor, who had attended his father, and whom Ralph liked. He came three or four times a day; he was deeply interested in his patient. Ralph had had Sir Matthew Hope, but he had got tired of this celebrated man, to whom he had asked his mother to send word that he was now dead, and was therefore without further need of medical advice. Mrs. Touchett had simply written to Sir Matthew that her son disliked him. On the day of Isabel’s arrival Ralph gave no sign, as I have related, for many hours; but towards evening he raised himself and said he knew that she had come. How he knew it was not apparent; inasmuch as, for fear of exciting him, no one had offered the information. Isabel came in and sat by his bed in the dim light; there was only a shaded candle in a corner of the room. She told the nurse that she might go—that she herself would sit with him for the rest of the evening. He had opened his eyes and recognised her, and had moved his hand, which lay very helpless beside him, so that she might take it. But he was unable to speak; he closed his eyes again and remained perfectly still, only keeping her hand in his own. She sat with him a long time—till the nurse came back; but he gave no further sign. He might have passed away while she looked at him; he was already the figure and pattern of death. She had thought him far gone in Rome, but this was worse; there was only one change possible now. There was a strange tranquillity in his face; it was as still as the lid of a box. With this, he was a mere lattice of bones; when he opened his eyes to greet her, it was as if she were looking into immeasurable space. It was not till midnight that the nurse came back; but the hours, to Isabel, had not seemed long; it was exactly what she had come for. If she had come simply to wait, she found ample occasion, for he lay for three days in a kind of grateful silence. He recognised her, and at moments he seemed to wish to speak; but he found no voice. Then he closed his eyes again, as if he too were waiting for something—for something that certainly would come. He was so absolutely quiet that it seemed to her what was coming had already arrived; and yet she never lost the sense that they were still together. But they were not always together; there were other hours that she passed in wandering through the empty house and listening for a voice that was not poor Ralph’s. She had a constant fear; she thought it possible her husband would write to her. But he remained silent, and she only got a letter from Florence from the Countess Gemini. Ralph, however, spoke at last, on the evening of the third day.     49   
  “I feel better to-night,” he murmured, abruptly, in the soundless dimness of her vigil; “I think I can say something.”     50   
  She sank upon her knees beside his pillow; took his thin hand in her own; begged him not to make an effort—not to tire himself.     51   
  His face was of necessity serious—it was incapable of the muscular play of a smile; but its owner apparently had not lost a perception of incongruities. “What does it matter if I am tired, when I have all eternity to rest?” he asked. “There is no harm in making an effort when it is the very last. Don’t people always feel better just before the end? I have often heard of that; it’s what I was waiting for. Ever since you have been here; I thought it would come. I tried two or three times; I was afraid you would get tired of sitting there.” He spoke slowly, with painful breaks and long pauses, his voice seemed to come from a distance. When he ceased, he lay with his face turned to Isabel, and his large unwinking eyes open into her own. “It was very good of you to come,” he went on. “I thought you would; but I wasn’t sure.”     52   
  “I was not sure either, till I came,” said Isabel.     53   
  “You have been like an angel beside my bed. You know they talk about the angel of death. It’s the most beautiful of all. You have been like that; as if you were waiting for me.”     54   
  “I was not waiting for your death; I was waiting for—for this. This is not death, dear Ralph.”     55   
  “Not for you—no. There is nothing makes us feel so much alive as to see others die. That’s the sensation of life—the sense that we remain. I have had it—even I. But now I am of no use but to give it to others. With me it’s all over.” And then he paused. Isabel bowed her head further, till it rested on the two hands that were clasped upon his own. She could not see him now; but his faraway voice was close to her ear. “Isabel,” he went on, suddenly, “I wish it were over for you.” She answered nothing; she had burst into sobs; she remained so, with her buried face. He lay silent, listening to her sobs; at last he gave a long groan. “Ah, what is it you have done for me?”     56   
  “What is it you did for me?” she cried, her now extreme agitation half smothered by her attitude. She had lost all her shame, all wish to hide things. Now he might know; she wished him to know, for it brought them supremely together, and he was beyond the reach of pain. “You did something once—you know it. Oh Ralph, you have been everything! What have I done for you—what can I do to-day? I would die if you could live. But I don’t wish you to live; I would die myself, not to lose you.” Her voice was as broken as his own, and full of tears and anguish.     57   
  “You won’t lose me—you will keep me. Keep me in your heart; I shall be nearer to you than I have ever been. Dear Isabel, life is better; for in life there is love. Death is good—but there is no love.”     58   
  “I never thanked you—I never spoke—I never was what I should be!” Isabel went on. She felt a passionate need to cry out and accuse herself, to let her sorrow possess her. All her troubles, for the moment, became single and melted together into this present pain. “What must you have thought of me? Yet how could I know? I never knew, and I only know to-day because there are people less stupid than I.”     59   
  “Don’t mind people,” said Ralph. “I think I am glad to leave people.”     60   
  She raised her head and her clapsed hands; she seemed for a moment to pray to him.     61   
  “Is it true—is it true?” she asked.     62   
  “True that you have been stupid? Oh no,” said Ralph, with a sensible intention of wit.     63   
  “That you made me rich—that all I have is yours?”     64   
  He turned away his head, and for some time said nothing. Then at last—     65   
  “Ah, don’t speak of that—that was not happy.” Slowly he moved his face toward her again, and they once more saw each other. “But for that—but for that—” And he paused. “I believe I ruined you,” he added softly.     66   
  She was full of the sense that he was beyond the reach of pain; he seemed already so little of this world. But even if she had not had it she would still have spoken, for nothing mattered now but the only knowledge that was not pure anguish—the knowledge that they were looking at the truth together.     67   
  “He married me for my money,” she said.     68   
  She wished to say everything; she was afraid he might die before she had done so.     69   
  He gazed at her a little, and for the first time his fixed eyes lowered their lids. But he raised them in a moment, and then—     70   
  “He was greatly in love with you,” he answered.     71   
  “Yes, he was in love with me. But he would not have married me if I had been poor. I don’t hurt you in saying that. How can I? I only want you to understand. I always tried to keep you from understanding; but that’s all over.”     72   
  “I always understood,” said Ralph.     73   
  “I thought you did, and I didn’t like it. But now I like it.”     74   
  “You don’t hurt me—you make me very happy.” And as Ralph said this there was an extraordinary gladness in his voice. She bent her head again, and pressed her lips to the back of his hand. “I always understood,” he continued, “though it was so strange—so pitiful. You wanted to look at life for yourself—but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!”     75   
  “Oh yes, I have been punished,” Isabel sobbed.     76   
  He listened to her a little, and then continued—     77   
  “Was he very bad about your coming?”     78   
  “He made it very hard for me. But I don’t care.”     79   
  “It is all over, then, between you?”     80   
  “Oh no; I don’t think anything is over.”     81   
  “Are you going back to him?” Ralph stammered.     82   
  “I don’t know—I can’t tell. I shall stay here as long as I may. I don’t want to think—I needn’t think. I don’t care for anything but you, and that is enough for the present. It will last a little yet. Here on my knees, with you dying in my arms, I am happier than I have been for a long time. And I want you to be happy—not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I am near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That is not the deepest thing; there is something deeper.”     83   
  Ralph evidently found, from moment to moment, greater difficulty in speaking; he had to wait longer to collect himself. At first he appeared to make no response to these last words; he let a long time elapse. Then he murmured simply—     84   
  “You must stay here.”     85   
  “I should like to stay, as long as seems right.”     86   
  “As seems right—as seems right?” He repeated her words. “Yes, you think a great deal about that.”     87   
  “Of course one must. You are very tired,” said Isabel.     88   
  “I am very tired. You said just now that pain is not the deepest thing. No—no. But it is very deep. If I could stay——”     89   
  “For me you will always be here,” she softly interrupted. It was easy to interrupt him.     90   
  But he went on, after a moment—     91   
  “It passes, after all; it’s passing now. But love remains. I don’t know why we should suffer so much. Perhaps I shall find out. There are many things in life; you are very young.”     92   
  “I feel very old,” said Isabel.     93   
  “You will grow young again. That’s how I see you. I don’t believe—I don’t believe——” And he stopped again; his strength failed him.     94   
  She begged him to be quiet now. “We needn’t speak to understand each other,” she said.     95   
  “I don’t believe that such a generous mistake as yours—can hurt you for more than a little.”     96   
  “Oh, Ralph, I am very happy now,” she cried, through her tears.     97   
  “And remember this,” he continued, “that if you have been hated, you have also been loved.”     98   
  “Ah, my brother!” she cried, with a movement of still deeper prostration.

Chapter LV   
     
HE had told her, the first evening she ever spent at Gardencourt, that if she should live to suffer enough she might some day see the ghost with which the old house was duly provided. She apparently had fulfilled the necessary condition; for the next morning, in the cold, faint dawn, she knew that a spirit was standing by her bed. She had lain down without undressing, for it was her belief that Ralph would not outlast the night. She had no inclination to sleep; she was waiting, and such waiting was wakeful. But she closed her eyes; she believed that as the night wore on she should hear a knock at her door. She heard no knock, but at the time the darkness began vaguely to grow grey, she started up from her pillow as abruptly as if she had received a summons. It seemed to her for an instant that Ralph was standing there—a dim, hovering figure in the dimness of the room. She stared a moment; she saw his white face—his kind eyes; then she saw there was nothing. She was not afraid; she was only sure. She went out of her room, and in her certainty passed through dark corridors and down a flight of oaken steps that shone in the vague light of a hall-window. Outside of Ralph’s door she stopped a moment, listening; but she seemed to hear only the hush that filled it. She opened the door with a hand as gentle as if she were lifting a veil from the face of the dead, and saw Mrs. Touchett sitting motionless and upright beside the couch of her son, with one of his hands in her own. The doctor was on the other side, with poor Ralph’s further wrist resting in his professional fingers. The nurse was at the foot, between them. Mrs. Touchett took no notice of Isabel, but the doctor looked at her very hard; then he gently placed Ralph’s hand in a proper position, close beside him. The nurse looked at her very hard too, and no one said a word; but Isabel only looked at what she had come to see. It was fairer than Ralph had ever been in life, and there was a strange resemblance to the face of his father, which, six years before, she had seen lying on the same pillow. She went to her aunt and put her arm round her; and Mrs. Touchett, who as a general thing neither invited nor enjoyed caresses, submitted for a moment to this one, rising, as it were, to take it. But she was stiff and dry-eyed; her acute white face was terrible.      1   
  “Poor Aunt Lydia,” Isabel murmured.      2   
  “Go and thank God you have no child,” said Mrs. Touchett, disengaging herself.      3   
  Three days after this a considerable number of people found time, in the height of the London “season,” to take a morning train down to a quiet station in Berkshire and spend half-an-hour in a small grey church, which stood within an easy walk. It was in the green burial-place of this edifice that Mrs. Touchett consigned her son to earth. She stood herself at the edge of the grave, and Isabel stood beside her; the sexton himself had not a more practical interest in the scene than Mrs. Touchett. It was a solemn occasion, but it was not a disagreeable one; there was a certain geniality in the appearance of things. The weather had changed to fair; the day, one of the last of the treacherous May-time, was warm and windless, and the air had the brightness of the hawthorn and the blackbird. If it was sad to think of poor Touchett, it was not too sad, since death, for him, had had no violence. He had been dying so long; he was so ready; everything had been so expected and prepared. There were tears in Isabel’s eyes, but they were not tears that blinded. She looked through them at the beauty of the day, the splendour of nature, the sweetness of the old English churchyard, the bowed heads of good friends. Lord Warburton was there, and a group of gentlemen unknown to Isabel, several of whom, as she afterwards learned, were connected with the bank; and there were others whom she knew. Miss Stackpole was among the first, with honest Mr. Bantling beside her; and Caspar Goodwood, lifting his head higher than the rest—bowing it rather less. During much of the time Isabel was conscious of Mr. Goodwood’s gaze; he looked at her somewhat harder than he usually looked in public, while the others had fixed their eyes upon the churchyard turf. But she never let him see that she saw him; she thought of him only to wonder that he was still in England. She found that she had taken for granted that after accompanying Ralph to Gardencourt he had gone away; she remembered that it was not a country that pleased him. He was there, however, very distinctly there; and something in his attitude seemed to say that he was there with a complex intention. She would not meet his eyes, though there was doubtless sympathy in them; he made her rather uneasy. With the dispersal of the little group he disappeared, and the only person who came to speak to her—though several spoke to Mrs. Touchett—was Henrietta Stackpole. Henrietta had been crying.      4   
  Ralph had said to Isabel that he hoped she would remain at Gardencourt, and she made no immediate motion to leave the place. She said to herself that it was but common charity to stay a little with her aunt. It was fortunate she had so good a formula; otherwise she might have been greatly in want of one. Her errand was over; she had done what she left her husband for. She had a husband in a foreign city, counting the hours of her absence; in such a case one needed an excellent motive. He was not one of the best husbands; but that didn’t alter the case. Certain obligations were involved in the very fact of marriage, and were quite independent of the quantity of enjoyment extracted from it. Isabel thought of her husband as little as might be; but now that she was at a distance, beyond its spell, she thought with a kind of spiritual shudder of Rome. There was a deadly sadness in the thought, and she drew back into the deepest shade of Gardencourt. She lived from day to day, postponing, closing her eyes, trying not to think. She knew she must decide, but she decided nothing; her coming itself had not been a decision. On that occasion she had simply started. Osmond gave no sound, and now evidently he would give none; he would leave it all to her. From Pansy she heard nothing, but that was very simple; her father had told her not to write.      5   
  Mrs. Touchett accepted Isabel’s company, but offered her no assistance; she appeared to be absorbed in considering, without enthusiasm, but with perfect lucidity, the new conveniences of her own situation. Mrs. Touchett was not an optimist, but even from painful occurrences she managed to extract a certain satisfaction. This consisted in the reflection that, after all, such things happened to other people and not to herself. Death was disagreeable, but in this case it was her son’s death, not her own; she had never flattered herself that her own would be disagreeable to any one but Mrs. Touchett. She was better off than poor Ralph, who had left all the commodities of life behind him, and indeed all the security; for the worst of dying was, to Mrs. Touchett’s mind, that it exposed one to be taken advantage of. For herself, she was on the spot; there was nothing so good as that. She made known to Isabel very punctually—it was the evening her son was buried—several of Ralph’s testamentary arrangements. He had told her everything, had consulted her about everything. He left her no money; of course she had no need of money. He left her the furniture of Gardencourt, exclusive of the pictures and books, and the use of the place for a year; after which it was to be sold. The money produced by the sale was to constitute an endowment for a hospital for poor persons suffering from the malady of which he died; and of this portion of the will Lord Warburton was appointed executor. The rest of his property, which was to be withdrawn from the bank, was disposed of in various bequests, several of them to those cousins in Vermont to whom his father had already been so bountiful. Then there were a number of small legacies.      6   
  “Some of them are extremely peculiar,” said Mrs. Touchett; “he has left considerable sums to persons I never heard of. He gave me a list, and I asked then who some of them were, and he told me they were people who at various times had seemed to like him. Apparently he thought you didn’t like him, for he has not left you a penny. It was his opinion that you were handsomely treated by his father, which I am bound to say I think you were—though I don’t mean that I ever heard him complain of it. The pictures are to be dispersed; he has distributed them about, one by one, as little keepsakes. The most valuable of the collection goes to Lord Warburton. And what do you think he has done with his library? It sounds like a practical joke. He has left it to your friend Miss Stackpole-‘in recognition of her services to literature.’ Does he mean her following him up from Rome? Was that a service to literature? It contains a great many rare and valuable books, and as she can’t carry it about the world in her trunk, he recommends her to sell it at auction. She will sell it of course at Christie’s and with the proceeds she will set up a newspaper. Will that be a service to literature?”      7   
  This question Isabel forbore to answer, as it exceeded the little interrogatory to which she had deemed it necessary to submit on her arrival. Besides, she had never been less interested in literature than to-day, as she found when she occasionally took down from the shelf one of the rare and valuable volumes of which Mrs. Touchett had spoken. She was quite unable to read; her attention had never been so little at her command. One afternoon, in the library, about a week after the ceremony in the churchyard, she was trying to fix it a little; but her eyes often wandered from the book in her hand to the open window, which looked down the long avenue. It was in this way that she saw a modest vehicle approach the door, and perceived Lord Warburton sitting, in rather an uncomfortable attitude, in a corner of it. He had always had a high standard of courtesy, and it was therefore not remarkable, under the circumstances, that he should have taken the trouble to come down from London to call upon Mrs. Touchett. It was of course Mrs. Touchett that he had come to see, and not Mrs. Osmond; and to prove to herself the validity of this theory, Isabel presently stepped out of the house and wandered away into the park. Since her arrival at Gardencourt she had been but little out of doors, the weather being unfavourable for visiting the grounds. This evening, however, was fine, and at first it struck her as a happy thought to have come out. The theory I have just mentioned was plausible enough, but it brought her little rest, and if you had seen her pacing about, you would have said she had a bad conscience. She was not pacified when at the end of a quarter of an hour, finding herself in view of the house, she saw Mrs. Touchett emerge from the portico, accompanied by her visitor. Her aunt had evidently proposed to Lord Warburton that they should come in search of her. She was in no humour for visitors, and if she had had time she would have drawn back, behind one of the great trees. But she saw that she had been seen and that nothing was left her but to advance. As the lawn at Gardencourt was a vast expanse, this took some time; during which she observed that, as he walked beside his hostess, Lord Warburton kept his hands rather stiffly behind him and his eyes upon the ground. Both persons apparently were silent; but Mrs. Touchett’s thin little glance, as she directed it toward Isabel; had even at a distance an expression. It seemed to say, with cutting sharpness, “Here is the eminently amenable noble-man whom you might have married!” When Lord Warburton lifted his own eyes, however, that was not what they said. They only said, “This is rather awkward, you know, and I depend upon you to help me.” He was very grave, very proper, and for the first time since Isabel had known him, he greeted her without a smile. Even in his days of distress he had always begun with a smile. He looked extremely self-conscious.      8   
  “Lord Warburton has been so good as to come out to see me,” said Mrs. Touchett. “He tells me he didn’t know you were still here. I know he’s an old friend of yours, and as I was told you were not in the house, I brought him out to see for himself.”      9   
  “Oh, I saw there was a good train at 6.40, that would get me back in time for dinner,” Mrs. Touchett’s companion explained, rather irrelevantly. “I am so glad to find you have not gone.”     10   
  “I am not here for long, you know,” Isabel said, with a certain eagerness.     11   
  “I suppose not; but I hope it’s for some weeks. You came to England sooner than—a—than you thought?”     12   
  “Yes, I came very suddenly.”     13   
  Mrs. Touchett turned away, as if she were looking at the condition of the grounds, which indeed was not what it should be; while Lord Warburton hesitated a little. Isabel fancied he had been on the point of asking about her husband—rather confusedly—and then had checked himself. He continued immitigably grave, either because he thought it becoming in a place over which death had just passed, or for more personal reasons. If he was conscious of personal reasons, it was very fortunate that he had the cover of the former motive; he could make the most of that. Isabel thought of all this. It was not that his face was sad, for that was another matter; but it was strangely inexpressive.     14   
  “My sisters would have been so glad to come if they had known you were still here—if they had thought you would see them,” Lord Warburton went on. “Do kindly let them see you before you leave England.”     15   
  “I don’t know whether you would come to Lockleigh for a day or two? You know there is always that old promise?” And his lordship blushed a little as he made this suggestion, which gave his face a somewhat more familiar air. “Perhaps I’m not right in saying that just now; of course you are not thinking of visiting. But I meant what would hardly be a visit. My sisters are to be at Lockleigh at Whitsuntide for three days; and if you could come then—as you say you are not to be very long in England—I would see that there should be literally no one else.”     16   
  Isabel wondered whether not even the young lady he was to marry would be there with her mamma; but she did not express this idea. “Thank you extremely,” she contented herself with saying; “I’m afraid I hardly know about Whitsuntide.”     17   
  “But I have your promise—haven’t I?—for some other time.”     18   
  There was an interrogation in this; but Isabel let it pass. She looked at her interlocutor a moment, and the result of her observation was that—as had happened before—she felt sorry for him. “Take care you don’t miss your train,” she said. And then she added, “I wish you every happiness.”     19   
  He blushed again, more than before, and he looked at his watch.     20   
  “Ah yes, 6.40; I haven’t much time, but I have a fly at the door. Thank you very much.” It was not apparent whether the thanks applied to her having reminded him of his train, or to the more sentimental remark. “Good-bye, Mrs. Osmond; good-bye.” He shook hands with her, without meeting her eye, and then he turned to Mrs. Touchett, who had wandered back to them. With her his parting was equally brief; and in a moment the two ladies saw him move with long steps across the lawn.     21   
  “Are you very sure he is to be married?” Isabel asked of her aunt.     22   
  “I can’t be surer than he; but he seems sure. I congratulated him, and he accepted it.”     23   
  “Ah,” said Isabel, “I give it up!”—while her aunt returned to the house and to those avocations which the visitor had interrupted.     24   
  She gave it up, but she still thought of it—thought of it while she strolled again under the great oaks whose shadows were long upon the acres of turf. At the end of a few minutes she found herself near a rustic bench, which, a moment after she had looked at it, struck her as an object recognised. It was not simply that she had seen it before, nor even that she had sat upon it; it was that in this spot something important had happened to her—that the place had an air of association. Then she remembered that she had been sitting there six years before, when a servant brought her from the house the letter in which Caspar Goodwood informed her that he had followed her to Europe; and that when she had read that letter she looked up to hear Lord Warburton announcing that he should like to marry her. It was indeed an historical, an interesting, bench; she stood and looked at it as if it might have something to say to her. She would not sit down on it now—she felt rather afraid of it. She only stood before it, and while she stood, the past came back to her in one of those rushing waves of emotion by which people of sensibility are visited at odd hours. The effect of this agitation was a sudden sense of being very tired, under the influence of which she overcame her scruples and sank into the rustic seat. I have said that she was restless and unable to occupy herself; and whether or no, if you had seen her there, you would have admired the justice of the former epithet, you would at least have allowed that at this moment she was the image of a victim of idleness. Her attitude had a singular absence of purpose; her hands, hanging at her sides, lost themselves in the folds of her black dress; her eyes gazed vaguely before her. There was nothing to recall her to the house, the two ladies, in their seclusion, dined early and had tea at an indefinite hour. How long she had sat in this position she could not have told you; but the twilight had grown thick when she became aware that she was not alone. She quickly straightened herself, glancing about, and then saw what had become of her solitude. She was sharing it with Caspar Goodwood, who stood looking at her, a few feet off, and whose footfall, on the unresonant turf, as he came near, she had not heard. It occurred to her, in the midst of this, that it was just so Lord Warburton had surprised her of old.     25   
  She instantly rose, and as soon as Goodwood saw that he was seen he started forward. She had had time only to rise, when with a motion that looked like violence, but felt like—she knew not what—he grasped her by the wrist and made her sink again into the seat. She closed her eyes; he had not hurt her, it was only a touch that she had obeyed. But there was something in his face that she wished not to see. That was the way he had looked at her the other day in the churchyard; only to-day it was worse. He said nothing at first; she only felt him close to her. It almost seemed to her that no one had ever been so close to her as that. All this, however, took but a moment, at the end of which she had disengaged her wrist, turning her eyes upon her visitant.     26   
  “You have frightened me,” she said.     27   
  “I didn’t mean to,” he answered, “but if I did a little, no matter. I came from London a while ago by the train, but I couldn’t come here directly. There was a man at the station who got ahead of me. He took a fly that was there, and I heard him give the order to drive here. I don’t know who he was, but I didn’t want to come with him; I wanted to see you alone. So I have been waiting and walking about. I have walked all over, and I was just coming to the house when I saw you here. There was a keeper, or some one, who met me; but that was all right, because I had made his acquaintance when I came here with your cousin. Is that gentleman gone? are you really alone? I want to speak to you.” Goodwood spoke very fast; he was as excited as when they parted in Rome. Isabel had hoped that condition would subside; and she shrank into herself as she perceived that, on the contrary he had only let out sail. She had a new sensation; he had never produced it before; it was a feeling of danger. There was indeed something awful in his persistency. Isabel gazed straight before her; he with a hand on each knee, leaned forward, looking deeply into her face. The twilight seemed to darken around them. “I want to speak to you,” he repeated; “I have something particular to say. I don’t want to trouble you—as I did the other day, in Rome. That was no use; it only distressed you. I couldn’t help it; I knew I was wrong. But I am not wrong now; please don’t think I am,” he went on, with his hard, deep voice melting a moment into entreaty. “I came here to-day for a purpose! it’s very different. It was no use for me to speak to you then; but now I can help you.”     28   
  She could not have told you whether it was because she was afraid, or because such a voice in the darkness seemed of necessity a boon; but she listened to him as she had never listened before; his words dropped deep into her soul. They produced a sort of stillness in all her being; and it was with an effort, in a moment, that she answered him.     29   
  “How can you help me?” she asked, in a low tone; as if she were taking what he had said seriously enough to make the inquiry in confidence.     30   
  “By inducing you to trust me. Now I know—to-day I know.—Do you remember what I asked you in Rome? Then I was quite in the dark. But to-day I know on good authority; everything is clear to me to-day. It was a good thing, when you made me come away with your cousin. He was a good fellow—he was a noble fellow—he told me how the case stands. He explained everything; he guessed what I thought of you. He was a member of your family, and he left you—so long as you should be in England—to my care,” said Goodwood, as if he were making a great point. “Do you know what he said to me the last time I saw him—as he lay there where he died? He said—‘Do everything you can for her; do everything she will let you.’”     31   
  Isabel suddenly got up. “You had no business to talk about me!”     32   
  “Why not—why not, when we talked in that way?” he demanded, following her fast. “And he was dying—when a man’s dying it’s different. She checked the movement she had made to leave him; she was listening more than ever; it was true that he was not the same as that last time. That had been aimless, fruitless passion; but at present he had an idea. Isabel scented his idea in all her being. “But it doesn’t matter!” he exclaimed, pressing her close, though now without touching a hem of her garment. If Touchett had never opened his mouth, I should have known all the same. I had only to look at you at your cousin’s funeral to see what’s the matter with you. You can’t deceive me any more; for God’s sake be honest with a man who is so honest with you. You are the most unhappy of women, and your husband’s a devil!”     33   
  She turned on him as if he had struck her. “Are you mad?”she cried.     34   
  “I have never been so sane; I see the whole thing. Don’t think it’s necessary to defend him. But I won’t say another word against him; I will speak only of you,” Goodwood added, quickly. “How can you pretend you are not heart-broken? You don’t know what to do—you don’t know where to turn. It’s too late to play a part; didn’t you leave all that behind you in Rome? Touchett knew all about it—and I knew it too—what it would cost you to come here. It will cost you your life? When I know that, how can I keep myself from wishing to save you? What would you think of me if I should stand still and see you go back to your reward? ‘It’s awful, what she’ll have to pay for it!’—that’s what Touchett said to me. I may tell you that, mayn’t I? He was such a near relation!” cried Goodwood, making his point again. “I would sooner have been shot than let another man say those things to me; but he was different; he seemed to me to have the right. It was after he got home—when he saw he was dying, and when I saw it too. I understand all about it: you are afraid to go back. You are perfectly alone; you don’t know where to turn. Now it is that I want you to think of me.”     35   
  “To think of you?” Isabel said, standing before him in the dusk. The idea of which she had caught a glimpse a few moments before now loomed large. She threw back her head a little; she stared at it as if it had been a comet in the sky.     36   
  “You don’t know where to turn; turn to me! I want to persuade you to trust me,” Goodwood repeated. And then he paused a moment, with his shining eyes. “Why should you go back—why should you go through that ghastly form?”     37   
  “To get away from you!” she answered. But this expressed only a little of what she felt. The rest was that she had never been loved before. It wrapped her about; it lifted her off her feet.     38   
  At first, in rejoinder to what she had said, it seemed to her that he would break out into greater violence. But after an instant he was perfectly quiet; he wished to prove that he was sane, that he had reasoned it all out. “I wish to prevent that, and I think I may, if you will only listen to me. It’s too monstrous to think of sinking back into that misery. It’s you that are out of your mind. Trust me as if I had the care of you. Why shouldn’t we be happy—when it’s here before us, when it’s so easy? I am yours for ever—for ever and ever. Here I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. What have you to care about? You have no children; that perhaps would be an obstacle. As it is, you have nothing to consider. You must save what you can of your life; you mustn’t lose it all simply because you have lost a part. It would be an insult to you to assume that you care for the look of the thing—for what people will say—for the bottomless idiocy of the world! We have nothing to do with all that; we are quite out of it; we look at things as they are. You took the great step in coming away; the next is nothing; it’s the natural one. I swear, as I stand here, that a woman deliberately made to suffer is justified in anything in life—in going down into the streets, if that will help her! I know how you suffer, and that’s why I am here. We can do absolutely as we please; to whom under the sun do we owe anything? What is it that holds us—what is it that has the smallest right to interfere in such a question as this? Such a question is between ourselves—and to say that is to settle it! Were we born to rot in our misery—were we born to be afraid? I never knew you afraid! If you only trust me, how little you will be disappointed! The world is all before us—and the world is very large. I know something about that.”     39   
  Isabel gave a long murmur, like a creature in pain; it was as if he were pressing something that hurt her. “The world is very small,” she said, at random; she had an immense desire to appear to resist. She said it at random, to hear herself say something; but it was not what she meant. The world, in truth, had never seemed so large; it seemed to open out, all round her, to take the form of a mighty sea, where she floated in fathomless waters. She had wanted help, and here was help; it had come in a rushing torrent. I know not whether she believed everything that he said; but she believed that to let him take her in his arms would be the next best thing to dying. This belief, for a moment, was a kind of rapture, in which she felt herself sinking and sinking. In the movement she seemed to beat with her feet, in order to catch herself, to feel something to rest on.     40   
  “Ah, be mine as I am yours!” she heard her companion cry. He had suddenly given up argument, and his voice seemed to come through a confusion of sound.     41   
  This however, of course, was but a subjective fact, as the metaphysicians say; the confusion, the noise of waters, and all the rest of it, were in her own head. In an instant she became aware of this. “Do me the greatest kindness of all,” she said. “I beseech you to go away!”     42   
  “Ah, don’t say that. Don’t kill me!” he cried.     43   
  She clasped her hands; her eyes were streaming with tears.     44   
  “As you love me, as you pity me, leave me alone!”     45   
  He glared at her a moment through the dusk, and the next instant she felt his arms about her, and his lips on her own lips. His kiss was like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free. She never looked about her; she only darted away from the spot. There were lights in the windows of the house; they shone far across the lawn. In an extraordinarily short time—for the distance was considerable—she had moved through the darkness (for she saw nothing) and reached the door. Here only she paused. She looked all about her; she listened a little; then she put her hand on the latch. She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path.     46   
  Two days afterwards, Caspar Goodwood knocked at the door of the house in Wimple Street in which Henrietta Stackpole occupied furnished lodgings. He had hardly removed his hand from the knocker when the door was opened, and Miss Stackpole herself stood before him. She had on her bonnet and jacket; she was on the point of going out.     47   
  “Oh, good morning,” he said, “I was in hope I should find Mrs. Osmond.”     48   
  Henrietta kept him waiting a moment for her reply; but there was a good deal of expression about Miss Stackpole even when she was silent.     49   
  “Pray what led you to suppose she was here?”     50   
  “I went down to Gardencourt this morning, and the servant told me she had come to London. He believed she was to come to you.”     51   
  Again Miss Stackpole held him—with an intention of perfect kindness—in suspense.     52   
  “She came here yesterday, and spent the night. But this morning she started for Rome.”     53   
  Caspar Goodwood was not looking at her; his eyes were fastened on the doorstep.     54   
  “Oh, she started—” he stammered. And without finishing his phrase, or looking up, he turned away.     55   
  Henrietta had come out, closing the door behind her, and now she put out her hand and grasped his arm.     56   
  “Look here, Mr. Goodwood,” she said; “just you wait!”     57   
  On which he looked up at her--but only to guess, from her face,
with a revulsion, that she simply meant he was young. She stood
shining at him with that cheap comfort, and it added, on the spot,
thirty years to his life. She walked him away with her, however,
as if she had given him now the key to patience.

Chapter 1


What determined the speech that startled him in the course of their encounter scarcely matters, being probably but some words spoken by himself quite without intention--spoken as they lingered and slowly moved together after their renewal of acquaintance. He had been conveyed by friends an hour or two before to the house at which she was staying; the party of visitors at the other house, of whom he was one, and thanks to whom it was his theory, as always, that he was lost in the crowd, had been invited over to luncheon. There had been after luncheon much dispersal, all in the interest of the original motive, a view of Weatherend itself and the fine things, intrinsic features, pictures, heirlooms, treasures of all the arts, that made the place almost famous; and the great rooms were so numerous that guests could wander at their will, hang back from the principal group and in cases where they took such matters with the last seriousness give themselves up to mysterious appreciations and measurements. There were persons to be observed, singly or in couples, bending toward objects in out-of-the-way corners with their hands on their knees and their heads nodding quite as with the emphasis of an excited sense of smell. When they were two they either mingled their sounds of ecstasy or melted into silences of even deeper import, so that there were aspects of the occasion that gave it for Marcher much the air of the "look round," previous to a sale highly advertised, that excites or quenches, as may be, the dream of acquisition. The dream of acquisition at Weatherend would have had to be wild indeed, and John Marcher found himself, among such suggestions, disconcerted almost equally by the presence of those who knew too much and by that of those who knew nothing. The great rooms caused so much poetry and history to press upon him that he needed some straying apart to feel in a proper relation with them, though this impulse was not, as happened, like the gloating of some of his companions, to be compared to the movements of a dog sniffing a cupboard. It had an issue promptly enough in a direction that was not to have been calculated.

It led, briefly, in the course of the October afternoon, to his closer meeting with May Bartram, whose face, a reminder, yet not quite a remembrance, as they sat much separated at a very long table, had begun merely by troubling him rather pleasantly. It affected him as the sequel of something of which he had lost the beginning. He knew it, and for the time quite welcomed it, as a continuation, but didn't know what it continued, which was an interest or an amusement the greater as he was also somehow aware-- yet without a direct sign from her--that the young woman herself hadn't lost the thread. She hadn't lost it, but she wouldn't give it back to him, he saw, without some putting forth of his hand for it; and he not only saw that, but saw several things more, things odd enough in the light of the fact that at the moment some accident of grouping brought them face to face he was still merely fumbling with the idea that any contact between them in the past would have had no importance. If it had had no importance he scarcely knew why his actual impression of her should so seem to have so much; the answer to which, however, was that in such a life as they all appeared to be leading for the moment one could but take things as they came. He was satisfied, without in the least being able to say why, that this young lady might roughly have ranked in the house as a poor relation; satisfied also that she was not there on a brief visit, but was more or less a part of the establishment--almost a working, a remunerated part. Didn't she enjoy at periods a protection that she paid for by helping, among other services, to show the place and explain it, deal with the tiresome people, answer questions about the dates of the building, the styles of the furniture, the authorship of the pictures, the favourite haunts of the ghost? It wasn't that she looked as if you could have given her shillings--it was impossible to look less so. Yet when she finally drifted toward him, distinctly handsome, though ever so much older--older than when he had seen her before-- it might have been as an effect of her guessing that he had, within the couple of hours, devoted more imagination to her than to all the others put together, and had thereby penetrated to a kind of truth that the others were too stupid for. She was there on harder terms than any one; she was there as a consequence of things suffered, one way and another, in the interval of years; and she remembered him very much as she was remembered--only a good deal better.

By the time they at last thus came to speech they were alone in one of the rooms--remarkable for a fine portrait over the chimney- place--out of which their friends had passed, and the charm of it was that even before they had spoken they had practically arranged with each other to stay behind for talk. The charm, happily, was in other things too--partly in there being scarce a spot at Weatherend without something to stay behind for. It was in the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned; the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour. It was most of all perhaps in the way she came to him as if, since she had been turned on to deal with the simpler sort, he might, should he choose to keep the whole thing down, just take her mild attention for a part of her general business. As soon as he heard her voice, however, the gap was filled up and the missing link supplied; the slight irony he divined in her attitude lost its advantage. He almost jumped at it to get there before her. "I met you years and years ago in Rome. I remember all about it." She confessed to disappointment--she had been so sure he didn't; and to prove how well he did he began to pour forth the particular recollections that popped up as he called for them. Her face and her voice, all at his service now, worked the miracle--the impression operating like the torch of a lamplighter who touches into flame, one by one, a long row of gas- jets. Marcher flattered himself the illumination was brilliant, yet he was really still more pleased on her showing him, with amusement, that in his haste to make everything right he had got most things rather wrong. It hadn't been at Rome--it had been at Naples; and it hadn't been eight years before--it had been more nearly ten. She hadn't been, either, with her uncle and aunt, but with her mother and brother; in addition to which it was not with the Pembles he had been, but with the Boyers, coming down in their company from Rome--a point on which she insisted, a little to his confusion, and as to which she had her evidence in hand. The Boyers she had known, but didn't know the Pembles, though she had heard of them, and it was the people he was with who had made them acquainted. The incident of the thunderstorm that had raged round them with such violence as to drive them for refuge into an excavation--this incident had not occurred at the Palace of the Caesars, but at Pompeii, on an occasion when they had been present there at an important find.

He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her corrections, though the moral of them was, she pointed out, that he really didn't remember the least thing about her; and he only felt it as a drawback that when all was made strictly historic there didn't appear much of anything left. They lingered together still, she neglecting her office--for from the moment he was so clever she had no proper right to him--and both neglecting the house, just waiting as to see if a memory or two more wouldn't again breathe on them. It hadn't taken them many minutes, after all, to put down on the table, like the cards of a pack, those that constituted their respective hands; only what came out was that the pack was unfortunately not perfect- -that the past, invoked, invited, encouraged, could give them, naturally, no more than it had. It had made them anciently meet-- her at twenty, him at twenty-five; but nothing was so strange, they seemed to say to each other, as that, while so occupied, it hadn't done a little more for them. They looked at each other as with the feeling of an occasion missed; the present would have been so much better if the other, in the far distance, in the foreign land, hadn't been so stupidly meagre. There weren't, apparently, all counted, more than a dozen little old things that had succeeded in coming to pass between them; trivialities of youth, simplicities of freshness, stupidities of ignorance, small possible germs, but too deeply buried--too deeply (didn't it seem?) to sprout after so many years. Marcher could only feel he ought to have rendered her some service--saved her from a capsized boat in the bay or at least recovered her dressing-bag, filched from her cab in the streets of Naples by a lazzarone with a stiletto. Or it would have been nice if he could have been taken with fever all alone at his hotel, and she could have come to look after him, to write to his people, to drive him out in convalescence. Then they would be in possession of the something or other that their actual show seemed to lack. It yet somehow presented itself, this show, as too good to be spoiled; so that they were reduced for a few minutes more to wondering a little helplessly why--since they seemed to know a certain number of the same people--their reunion had been so long averted. They didn't use that name for it, but their delay from minute to minute to join the others was a kind of confession that they didn't quite want it to be a failure. Their attempted supposition of reasons for their not having met but showed how little they knew of each other. There came in fact a moment when Marcher felt a positive pang. It was vain to pretend she was an old friend, for all the communities were wanting, in spite of which it was as an old friend that he saw she would have suited him. He had new ones enough--was surrounded with them for instance on the stage of the other house; as a new one he probably wouldn't have so much as noticed her. He would have liked to invent something, get her to make-believe with him that some passage of a romantic or critical kind had originally occurred. He was really almost reaching out in imagination--as against time--for something that would do, and saying to himself that if it didn't come this sketch of a fresh start would show for quite awkwardly bungled. They would separate, and now for no second or no third chance. They would have tried and not succeeded. Then it was, just at the turn, as he afterwards made it out to himself, that, everything else failing, she herself decided to take up the case and, as it were, save the situation. He felt as soon as she spoke that she had been consciously keeping back what she said and hoping to get on without it; a scruple in her that immensely touched him when, by the end of three or four minutes more, he was able to measure it. What she brought out, at any rate, quite cleared the air and supplied the link--the link it was so odd he should frivolously have managed to lose.

"You know you told me something I've never forgotten and that again and again has made me think of you since; it was that tremendously hot day when we went to Sorrento, across the bay, for the breeze. What I allude to was what you said to me, on the way back, as we sat under the awning of the boat enjoying the cool. Have you forgotten?"

He had forgotten, and was even more surprised than ashamed. But the great thing was that he saw in this no vulgar reminder of any "sweet" speech. The vanity of women had long memories, but she was making no claim on him of a compliment or a mistake. With another woman, a totally different one, he might have feared the recall possibly even some imbecile "offer." So, in having to say that he had indeed forgotten, he was conscious rather of a loss than of a gain; he already saw an interest in the matter of her mention. "I try to think--but I give it up. Yet I remember the Sorrento day."

"I'm not very sure you do," May Bartram after a moment said; "and I'm not very sure I ought to want you to. It's dreadful to bring a person back at any time to what he was ten years before. If you've lived away from it," she smiled, "so much the better."

"Ah if you haven't why should I?" he asked.

"Lived away, you mean, from what I myself was?"

"From what I was. I was of course an ass," Marcher went on; "but I would rather know from you just the sort of ass I was than--from the moment you have something in your mind--not know anything."

Still, however, she hesitated. "But if you've completely ceased to be that sort--?"

"Why I can then all the more bear to know. Besides, perhaps I haven't."

"Perhaps. Yet if you haven't," she added, "I should suppose you'd remember. Not indeed that I in the least connect with my impression the invidious name you use. If I had only thought you foolish," she explained, "the thing I speak of wouldn't so have remained with me. It was about yourself." She waited as if it might come to him; but as, only meeting her eyes in wonder, he gave no sign, she burnt her ships. "Has it ever happened?"

Then it was that, while he continued to stare, a light broke for him and the blood slowly came to his face, which began to burn with recognition.

"Do you mean I told you--?" But he faltered, lest what came to him shouldn't be right, lest he should only give himself away.

"It was something about yourself that it was natural one shouldn't forget--that is if one remembered you at all. That's why I ask you," she smiled, "if the thing you then spoke of has ever come to pass?"

Oh then he saw, but he was lost in wonder and found himself embarrassed. This, he also saw, made her sorry for him, as if her allusion had been a mistake. It took him but a moment, however, to feel it hadn't been, much as it had been a surprise. After the first little shock of it her knowledge on the contrary began, even if rather strangely, to taste sweet to him. She was the only other person in the world then who would have it, and she had had it all these years, while the fact of his having so breathed his secret had unaccountably faded from him. No wonder they couldn't have met as if nothing had happened. "I judge," he finally said, "that I know what you mean. Only I had strangely enough lost any sense of having taken you so far into my confidence."

"Is it because you've taken so many others as well?"

"I've taken nobody. Not a creature since then."

"So that I'm the only person who knows?"

"The only person in the world."

"Well," she quickly replied, "I myself have never spoken. I've never, never repeated of you what you told me." She looked at him so that he perfectly believed her. Their eyes met over it in such a way that he was without a doubt. "And I never will."

She spoke with an earnestness that, as if almost excessive, put him at ease about her possible derision. Somehow the whole question was a new luxury to him--that is from the moment she was in possession. If she didn't take the sarcastic view she clearly took the sympathetic, and that was what he had had, in all the long time, from no one whomsoever. What he felt was that he couldn't at present have begun to tell her, and yet could profit perhaps exquisitely by the accident of having done so of old. "Please don't then. We're just right as it is."

"Oh I am," she laughed, "if you are!" To which she added: "Then you do still feel in the same way?"

It was impossible he shouldn't take to himself that she was really interested, though it all kept coining as a perfect surprise. He had thought of himself so long as abominably alone, and lo he wasn't alone a bit. He hadn't been, it appeared, for an hour-- since those moments on the Sorrento boat. It was she who had been, he seemed to see as he looked at her--she who had been made so by the graceless fact of his lapse of fidelity. To tell her what he had told her--what had it been but to ask something of her? something that she had given, in her charity, without his having, by a remembrance, by a return of the spirit, failing another encounter, so much as thanked her. What he had asked of her had been simply at first not to laugh at him. She had beautifully not done so for ten years, and she was not doing so now. So he had endless gratitude to make up. Only for that he must see just how he had figured to her. "What, exactly, was the account I gave--?"

"Of the way you did feel? Well, it was very simple. You said you had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you."

"Do you call that very simple?" John Marcher asked.

She thought a moment. "It was perhaps because I seemed, as you spoke, to understand it."

"You do understand it?" he eagerly asked.

Again she kept her kind eyes on him. "You still have the belief?"

"Oh!" he exclaimed helplessly. There was too much to say.

"Whatever it's to be," she clearly made out, "it hasn't yet come."

He shook his head in complete surrender now. "It hasn't yet come. Only, you know, it isn't anything I'm to do, to achieve in the world, to be distinguished or admired for. I'm not such an ass as that. It would be much better, no doubt, if I were."

"It's to be something you're merely to suffer?"

"Well, say to wait for--to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape themselves."

She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for him not to be that of mockery. "Isn't what you describe perhaps but the expectation--or at any rate the sense of danger, familiar to so many people--of falling in love?"

John Marcher thought. "Did you ask me that before?"

"No--I wasn't so free-and-easy then. But it's what strikes me now."

"Of course," he said after a moment, "it strikes you. Of course it strikes me. Of course what's in store for me may be no more than that. The only thing is," he went on, "that I think if it had been that I should by this time know."

"Do you mean because you've been in love?" And then as he but looked at her in silence: "You've been in love, and it hasn't meant such a cataclysm, hasn't proved the great affair?"

"Here I am, you see. It hasn't been overwhelming."

"Then it hasn't been love," said May Bartram.

"Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that--I've taken it till now. It was agreeable, it was delightful, it was miserable," he explained. "But it wasn't strange. It wasn't what my affair's to be."

"You want something all to yourself--something that nobody else knows or has known?"

"It isn't a question of what I 'want'--God knows I don't want anything. It's only a question of the apprehension that haunts me- -that I live with day by day."

He said this so lucidly and consistently that he could see it further impose itself. If she hadn't been interested before she'd have been interested now.

"Is it a sense of coming violence?"

Evidently now too again he liked to talk of it. "I don't think of it as--when it does come--necessarily violent. I only think of it as natural and as of course above all unmistakeable. I think of it simply as the thing. The thing will of itself appear natural."

"Then how will it appear strange?"

Marcher bethought himself. "It won't--to me."

"To whom then?"

"Well," he replied, smiling at last, "say to you."

"Oh then I'm to be present?"

"Why you are present--since you know."

"I see." She turned it over. "But I mean at the catastrophe."

At this, for a minute, their lightness gave way to their gravity; it was as if the long look they exchanged held them together. "It will only depend on yourself--if you'll watch with me."

"Are you afraid?" she asked.

"Don't leave me now," he went on.

"Are you afraid?" she repeated.

"Do you think me simply out of my mind?" he pursued instead of answering. "Do I merely strike you as a harmless lunatic?"

"No," said May Bartram. "I understand you. I believe you."

"You mean you feel how my obsession--poor old thing--may correspond to some possible reality?"

"To some possible reality."

"Then you will watch with me?"

She hesitated, then for the third time put her question. "Are you afraid?"

"Did I tell you I was--at Naples?"

"No, you said nothing about it."

"Then I don't know. And I should like to know," said John Marcher. "You'll tell me yourself whether you think so. If you'll watch with me you'll see."

"Very good then." They had been moving by this time across the room, and at the door, before passing out, they paused as for the full wind-up of their understanding. "I'll watch with you," said May Bartram.

Chapter 2


The fact that she "knew"--knew and yet neither chaffed him nor betrayed him--had in a short time begun to constitute between them a goodly bond, which became more marked when, within the year that followed their afternoon at Weatherend, the opportunities for meeting multiplied. The event that thus promoted these occasions was the death of the ancient lady her great-aunt, under whose wing, since losing her mother, she had to such an extent found shelter, and who, though but the widowed mother of the new successor to the property, had succeeded--thanks to a high tone and a high temper-- in not forfeiting the supreme position at the great house. The deposition of this personage arrived but with her death, which, followed by many changes, made in particular a difference for the young woman in whom Marcher's expert attention had recognised from the first a dependent with a pride that might ache though it didn't bristle. Nothing for a long time had made him easier than the thought that the aching must have been much soothed by Miss Bartram's now finding herself able to set up a small home in London. She had acquired property, to an amount that made that luxury just possible, under her aunt's extremely complicated will, and when the whole matter began to be straightened out, which indeed took time, she let him know that the happy issue was at last in view. He had seen her again before that day, both because she had more than once accompanied the ancient lady to town and because he had paid another visit to the friends who so conveniently made of Weatherend one of the charms of their own hospitality. These friends had taken him back there; he had achieved there again with Mss Bartram some quiet detachment; and he had in London succeeded in persuading her to more than one brief absence from her aunt. They went together, on these latter occasions, to the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum, where, among vivid reminders, they talked of Italy at large--not now attempting to recover, as at first, the taste of their youth and their ignorance. That recovery, the first day at Weatherend, had served its purpose well, had given them quite enough; so that they were, to Marcher's sense, no longer hovering about the head-waters of their stream, but had felt their boat pushed sharply off and down the current.

They were literally afloat together; for our gentleman this was marked, quite as marked as that the fortunate cause of it was just the buried treasure of her knowledge. He had with his own hands dug up this little hoard, brought to light--that is to within reach of the dim day constituted by their discretions and privacies--the object of value the hiding-place of which he had, after putting it into the ground himself, so strangely, so long forgotten. The rare luck of his having again just stumbled on the spot made him indifferent to any other question; he would doubtless have devoted more time to the odd accident of his lapse of memory if he hadn't been moved to devote so much to the sweetness, the comfort, as he felt, for the future, that this accident itself had helped to keep fresh. It had never entered into his plan that any one should "know", and mainly for the reason that it wasn't in him to tell any one. That would have been impossible, for nothing but the amusement of a cold world would have waited on it. Since, however, a mysterious fate had opened his mouth betimes, in spite of him, he would count that a compensation and profit by it to the utmost. That the right person should know tempered the asperity of his secret more even than his shyness had permitted him to imagine; and May Bartram was clearly right, because--well, because there she was. Her knowledge simply settled it; he would have been sure enough by this time had she been wrong. There was that in his situation, no doubt, that disposed him too much to see her as a mere confidant, taking all her light for him from the fact--the fact only--of her interest in his predicament; from her mercy, sympathy, seriousness, her consent not to regard him as the funniest of the funny. Aware, in fine, that her price for him was just in her giving him this constant sense of his being admirably spared, he was careful to remember that she had also a life of her own, with things that might happen to her, things that in friendship one should likewise take account of. Something fairly remarkable came to pass with him, for that matter, in this connexion--something represented by a certain passage of his consciousness, in the suddenest way, from one extreme to the other.

He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew, the most disinterested person in the world, carrying his concentrated burden, his perpetual suspense, ever so quietly, holding his tongue about it, giving others no glimpse of it nor of its effect upon his life, asking of them no allowance and only making on his side all those that were asked. He hadn't disturbed people with the queerness of their having to know a haunted man, though he had had moments of rather special temptation on hearing them say they were forsooth "unsettled." If they were as unsettled as he was--he who had never been settled for an hour in his life--they would know what it meant. Yet it wasn't, all the same, for him to make them, and he listened to them civilly enough. This was why he had such good--though possibly such rather colourless--manners; this was why, above all, he could regard himself, in a greedy world, as decently--as in fact perhaps even a little sublimely--unselfish. Our point is accordingly that he valued this character quite sufficiently to measure his present danger of letting it lapse, against which he promised himself to be much on his guard. He was quite ready, none the less, to be selfish just a little, since surely no more charming occasion for it had come to him. "Just a little," in a word, was just as much as Mss Bartram, taking one day with another, would let him. He never would be in the least coercive, and would keep well before him the lines on which consideration for her--the very highest--ought to proceed. He would thoroughly establish the heads under which her affairs, her requirements, her peculiarities--he went so far as to give them the latitude of that name--would come into their intercourse. All this naturally was a sign of how much he took the intercourse itself for granted. There was nothing more to be done about that. It simply existed; had sprung into being with her first penetrating question to him in the autumn light there at Weatherend. The real form it should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form of their marrying. But the devil in this was that the very basis itself put marrying out of the question. His conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, in short, wasn't a privilege he could invite a woman to share; and that consequence of it was precisely what was the matter with him. Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching Beast in the Jungle. It signified little whether the crouching Beast were destined to slay him or to be slain. The definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn't cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt. Such was the image under which he had ended by figuring his life.

They had at first, none the less, in the scattered hours spent together, made no allusion to that view of it; which was a sign he was handsomely alert to give that he didn't expect, that he in fact didn't care, always to be talking about it. Such a feature in one's outlook was really like a hump on one's back. The difference it made every minute of the day existed quite independently of discussion. One discussed of course like a hunchback, for there was always, if nothing else, the hunchback face. That remained, and she was watching him; but people watched best, as a general thing, in silence, so that such would be predominantly the manner of their vigil. Yet he didn't want, at the same time, to be tense and solemn; tense and solemn was what he imagined he too much showed for with other people. The thing to be, with the one person who knew, was easy and natural--to make the reference rather than be seeming to avoid it, to avoid it rather than be seeming to make it, and to keep it, in any case, familiar, facetious even, rather than pedantic and portentous. Some such consideration as the latter was doubtless in his mind for instance when he wrote pleasantly to Miss Bartram that perhaps the great thing he had so long felt as in the lap of the gods was no more than this circumstance, which touched him so nearly, of her acquiring a house in London. It was the first allusion they had yet again made, needing any other hitherto so little; but when she replied, after having given him the news, that she was by no means satisfied with such a trifle as the climax to so special a suspense, she almost set him wondering if she hadn't even a larger conception of singularity for him than he had for himself. He was at all events destined to become aware little by little, as time went by, that she was all the while looking at his life, judging it, measuring it, in the light of the thing she knew, which grew to be at last, with the consecration of the years, never mentioned between them save as "the real truth" about him. That had always been his own form of reference to it, but she adopted the form so quietly that, looking back at the end of a period, he knew there was no moment at which it was traceable that she had, as he might say, got inside his idea, or exchanged the attitude of beautifully indulging for that of still more beautifully believing him.

It was always open to him to accuse her of seeing him but as the most harmless of maniacs, and this, in the long run--since it covered so much ground--was his easiest description of their friendship. He had a screw loose for her but she liked him in spite of it and was practically, against the rest of the world, his kind wise keeper, unremunerated but fairly amused and, in the absence of other near ties, not disreputably occupied. The rest of the world of course thought him queer, but she, she only, knew how, and above all why, queer; which was precisely what enabled her to dispose the concealing veil in the right folds. She took his gaiety from him--since it had to pass with them for gaiety--as she took everything else; but she certainly so far justified by her unerring touch his finer sense of the degree to which he had ended by convincing her. She at least never spoke of the secret of his life except as "the real truth about you," and she had in fact a wonderful way of making it seem, as such, the secret of her own life too. That was in fine how he so constantly felt her as allowing for him; he couldn't on the whole call it anything else. He allowed for himself, but she, exactly, allowed still more; partly because, better placed for a sight of the matter, she traced his unhappy perversion through reaches of its course into which he could scarce follow it. He knew how he felt, but, besides knowing that, she knew how he looked as well; he knew each of the things of importance he was insidiously kept from doing, but she could add up the amount they made, understand how much, with a lighter weight on his spirit, he might have done, and thereby establish how, clever as he was, he fell short. Above all she was in the secret of the difference between the forms he went through--those of his little office under Government, those of caring for his modest patrimony, for his library, for his garden in the country, for the people in London whose invitations he accepted and repaid--and the detachment that reigned beneath them and that made of all behaviour, all that could in the least be called behaviour, a long act of dissimulation. What it had come to was that he wore a mask painted with the social simper, out of the eye-holes of which there looked eyes of an expression not in the least matching the other features. This the stupid world, even after years, had never more than half discovered. It was only May Bartram who had, and she achieved, by an art indescribable, the feat of at once--or perhaps it was only alternately--meeting the eyes from in front and mingling her own vision, as from over his shoulder, with their peep through the apertures.

So while they grew older together she did watch with him, and so she let this association give shape and colour to her own existence. Beneath her forms as well detachment had learned to sit, and behaviour had become for her, in the social sense, a false account of herself. There was but one account of her that would have been true all the while and that she could give straight to nobody, least of all to John Marcher. Her whole attitude was a virtual statement, but the perception of that only seemed called to take its place for him as one of the many things necessarily crowded out of his consciousness. If she had moreover, like himself, to make sacrifices to their real truth, it was to be granted that her compensation might have affected her as more prompt and more natural. They had long periods, in this London time, during which, when they were together, a stranger might have listened to them without in the least pricking up his ears; on the other hand the real truth was equally liable at any moment to rise to the surface, and the auditor would then have wondered indeed what they were talking about. They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by this had fairly become one of their commonplaces. Yet there were still moments when the situation turned almost fresh--usually under the effect of some expression drawn from herself. Her expressions doubtless repeated themselves, but her intervals were generous. "What saves us, you know, is that we answer so completely to so usual an appearance: that of the man and woman whose friendship has become such a daily habit--or almost--as to be at last indispensable." That for instance was a remark she had frequently enough had occasion to make, though she had given it at different times different developments. What we are especially concerned with is the turn it happened to take from her one afternoon when he had come to see her in honour of her birthday. This anniversary had fallen on a Sunday, at a season of thick fog and general outward gloom; but he had brought her his customary offering, having known her now long enough to have established a hundred small traditions. It was one of his proofs to himself, the present he made her on her birthday, that he hadn't sunk into real selfishness. It was mostly nothing more than a small trinket, but it was always fine of its kind, and he was regularly careful to pay for it more than he thought he could afford. "Our habit saves you, at least, don't you see?" because it makes you, after all, for the vulgar, indistinguishable from other men. What's the most inveterate mark of men in general? Why the capacity to spend endless time with dull women--to spend it I won't say without being bored, but without minding that they are, without being driven off at a tangent by it; which comes to the same thing. I'm your dull woman, a part of the daily bread for which you pray at church. That covers your tracks more than anything."

"And what covers yours?" asked Marcher, whom his dull woman could mostly to this extent amuse. "I see of course what you mean by your saving me, in this way and that, so far as other people are concerned--I've seen it all along. Only what is it that saves you? I often think, you know, of that."

She looked as if she sometimes thought of that too, but rather in a different way. "Where other people, you mean, are concerned?"

"Well, you're really so in with me, you know--as a sort of result of my being so in with yourself. I mean of my having such an immense regard for you, being so tremendously mindful of all you've done for me. I sometimes ask myself if it's quite fair. Fair I mean to have so involved and--since one may say it--interested you. I almost feel as if you hadn't really had time to do anything else."

"Anything else but be interested?" she asked. "Ah what else does one ever want to be? If I've been 'watching' with you, as we long ago agreed I was to do, watching's always in itself an absorption."

"Oh certainly," John Marcher said, "if you hadn't had your curiosity -! Only doesn't it sometimes come to you as time goes on that your curiosity isn't being particularly repaid?"

May Bartram had a pause. "Do you ask that, by any chance, because you feel at all that yours isn't? I mean because you have to wait so long."

Oh he understood what she meant! "For the thing to happen that never does happen? For the Beast to jump out? No, I'm just where I was about it. It isn't a matter as to which I can choose, I can decide for a change. It isn't one as to which there can be a change. It's in the lap of the gods. One's in the hands of one's law--there one is. As to the form the law will take, the way it will operate, that's its own affair."

"Yes," Miss Bartram replied; "of course one's fate's coming, of course it has come in its own form and its own way, all the while. Only, you know, the form and the way in your case were to have been--well, something so exceptional and, as one may say, so particularly your own."

Something in this made him look at her with suspicion. "You say 'were to have been,' as if in your heart you had begun to doubt."

"Oh!" she vaguely protested.

"As if you believed," he went on, "that nothing will now take place."

She shook her head slowly but rather inscrutably. "You're far from my thought."

He continued to look at her. "What then is the matter with you?"

"Well," she said after another wait, "the matter with me is simply that I'm more sure than ever my curiosity, as you call it, will be but too well repaid."

They were frankly grave now; he had got up from his seat, had turned once more about the little drawing-room to which, year after year, he brought his inevitable topic; in which he had, as he might have said, tasted their intimate community with every sauce, where every object was as familiar to him as the things of his own house and the very carpets were worn with his fitful walk very much as the desks in old counting-houses are worn by the elbows of generations of clerks. The generations of his nervous moods had been at work there, and the place was the written history of his whole middle life. Under the impression of what his friend had just said he knew himself, for some reason, more aware of these things; which made him, after a moment, stop again before her. "Is it possibly that you've grown afraid?"

"Afraid?" He thought, as she repeated the word, that his question had made her, a little, change colour; so that, lest he should have touched on a truth, he explained very kindly: "You remember that that was what you asked me long ago--that first day at Weatherend."

"Oh yes, and you told me you didn't know--that I was to see for myself. We've said little about it since, even in so long a time."

"Precisely," Marcher interposed--"quite as if it were too delicate a matter for us to make free with. Quite as if we might find, on pressure, that I am afraid. For then," he said, "we shouldn't, should we? quite know what to do."

She had for the time no answer to this question. "There have been days when I thought you were. Only, of course," she added, "there have been days when we have thought almost anything."

"Everything. Oh!" Marcher softly groaned, as with a gasp, half spent, at the face, more uncovered just then than it had been for a long while, of the imagination always with them. It had always had it's incalculable moments of glaring out, quite as with the very eyes of the very Beast, and, used as he was to them, they could still draw from him the tribute of a sigh that rose from the depths of his being. All they had thought, first and last, rolled over him; the past seemed to have been reduced to mere barren speculation. This in fact was what the place had just struck him as so full of--the simplification of everything but the state of suspense. That remained only by seeming to hang in the void surrounding it. Even his original fear, if fear it as had been, had lost itself in the desert. "I judge, however," he continued, "that you see I'm not afraid now."

"What I see, as I make it out, is that you've achieved something almost unprecedented in the way of getting used to danger. Living with it so long and so closely you've lost your sense of it; you know it's there, but you're indifferent, and you cease even, as of old, to have to whistle in the dark. Considering what the danger is," May Bartram wound up, "I'm bound to say I don't think your attitude could well be surpassed."

John Marcher faintly smiled. "It's heroic?"

"Certainly--call it that."

It was what he would have liked indeed to call it. "I am then a man of courage?"

"That's what you were to show me."

He still, however, wondered. "But doesn't the man of courage know what he's afraid of--or not afraid of? I don't know that, you see. I don't focus it. I can't name it. I only know I'm exposed."

"Yes, but exposed--how shall I say?--so directly. So intimately. That's surely enough."

"Enough to make you feel then--as what we may call the end and the upshot of our watch--that I'm not afraid?"

"You're not afraid. But it isn't," she said, "the end of our watch. That is it isn't the end of yours. You've everything still to see."

"Then why haven't you?" he asked. He had had, all along, to-day, the sense of her keeping something back, and he still had it. As this was his first impression of that it quite made a date. The case was the more marked as she didn't at first answer; which in turn made him go on. "You know something I don't." Then his voice, for that of a man of courage, trembled a little. "You know what's to happen." Her silence, with the face she showed, was almost a confession--it made him sure. "You know, and you're afraid to tell me. It's so bad that you're afraid I'll find out."

All this might be true, for she did look as if, unexpectedly to her, he had crossed some mystic line that she had secretly drawn round her. Yet she might, after all, not have worried; and the real climax was that he himself, at all events, needn't. "You'll never find out."

Chapter 3


It was all to have made, none the less, as I have said, a date; which came out in the fact that again and again, even after long intervals, other things that passed between them were in relation to this hour but the character of recalls and results. Its immediate effect had been indeed rather to lighten insistence-- almost to provoke a reaction; as if their topic had dropped by its own weight and as if moreover, for that matter, Marcher had been visited by one of his occasional warnings against egotism. He had kept up, he felt, and very decently on the whole, his consciousness of the importance of not being selfish, and it was true that he had never sinned in that direction without promptly enough trying to press the scales the other way. He often repaired his fault, the season permitting, by inviting his friend to accompany him to the opera; and it not infrequently thus happened that, to show he didn't wish her to have but one sort of food for her mind, he was the cause of her appearing there with him a dozen nights in the month. It even happened that, seeing her home at such times, he occasionally went in with her to finish, as he called it, the evening, and, the better to make his point, sat down to the frugal but always careful little supper that awaited his pleasure. His point was made, he thought, by his not eternally insisting with her on himself; made for instance, at such hours, when it befell that, her piano at hand and each of them familiar with it, they went over passages of the opera together. It chanced to be on one of these occasions, however, that he reminded her of her not having answered a certain question he had put to her during the talk that had taken place between them on her last birthday. "What is it that saves you?"--saved her, he meant, from that appearance of variation from the usual human type. If he had practically escaped remark, as she pretended, by doing, in the most important particular, what most men do--find the answer to life in patching up an alliance of a sort with a woman no better than himself--how had she escaped it, and how could the alliance, such as it was, since they must suppose it had been more or less noticed, have failed to make her rather positively talked about?

"I never said," May Bartram replied, "that it hadn't made me a good deal talked about."

"Ah well then you're not 'saved.'"

"It hasn't been a question for me. If you've had your woman I've had," she said, "my man."

"And you mean that makes you all right?"

Oh it was always as if there were so much to say!

"I don't know why it shouldn't make me--humanly, which is what we're speaking of--as right as it makes you."

"I see," Marcher returned. "'Humanly,' no doubt, as showing that you're living for something. Not, that is, just for me and my secret."

May Bartram smiled. "I don't pretend it exactly shows that I'm not living for you. It's my intimacy with you that's in question."

He laughed as he saw what she meant. "Yes, but since, as you say, I'm only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you're--aren't you? no more than ordinary either. You help me to pass for a man like another. So if I am, as I understand you, you're not compromised. Is that it?"

She had another of her waits, but she spoke clearly enough. "That's it. It's all that concerns me--to help you to pass for a man like another."

He was careful to acknowledge the remark handsomely. "How kind, how beautiful, you are to me! How shall I ever repay you?"

She had her last grave pause, as if there might be a choice of ways. But she chose. "By going on as you are."

It was into this going on as he was that they relapsed, and really for so long a time that the day inevitably came for a further sounding of their depths. These depths, constantly bridged over by a structure firm enough in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of the abyss. A difference had been made moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had all the while not appeared to feel the need of rebutting his charge of an idea within her that she didn't dare to express--a charge uttered just before one of the fullest of their later discussions ended. It had come up for him then that she "knew" something and that what she knew was bad--too bad to tell him. When he had spoken of it as visibly so bad that she was afraid he might find it out, her reply had left the matter too equivocal to be let alone and yet, for Marcher's special sensibility, almost too formidable again to touch. He circled about it at a distance that alternately narrowed and widened and that still wasn't much affected by the consciousness in him that there was nothing she could "know," after all, any better than he did. She had no source of knowledge he hadn't equally-- except of course that she might have finer nerves. That was what women had where they were interested; they made out things, where people were concerned, that the people often couldn't have made out for themselves. Their nerves, their sensibility, their imagination, were conductors and revealers, and the beauty of May Bartram was in particular that she had given herself so to his case. He felt in these days what, oddly enough, he had never felt before, the growth of a dread of losing her by some catastrophe-- some catastrophe that yet wouldn't at all be the catastrophe: partly because she had almost of a sudden begun to strike him as more useful to him than ever yet, and partly by reason of an appearance of uncertainty in her health, co-incident and equally new. It was characteristic of the inner detachment he had hitherto so successfully cultivated and to which our whole account of him is a reference, it was characteristic that his complications, such as they were, had never yet seemed so as at this crisis to thicken about him, even to the point of making him ask himself if he were, by any chance, of a truth, within sight or sound, within touch or reach, within the immediate jurisdiction, of the thing that waited.

When the day came, as come it had to, that his friend confessed to him her fear of a deep disorder in her blood, he felt somehow the shadow of a change and the chill of a shock. He immediately began to imagine aggravations and disasters, and above all to think of her peril as the direct menace for himself of personal privation. This indeed gave him one of those partial recoveries of equanimity that were agreeable to him--it showed him that what was still first in his mind was the loss she herself might suffer. "What if she should have to die before knowing, before seeing--?" It would have been brutal, in the early stages of her trouble, to put that question to her; but it had immediately sounded for him to his own concern, and the possibility was what most made him sorry for her. If she did "know," moreover, in the sense of her having had some-- what should he think?--mystical irresistible light, this would make the matter not better, but worse, inasmuch as her original adoption of his own curiosity had quite become the basis of her life. She had been living to see what would be to be seen, and it would quite lacerate her to have to give up before the accomplishment of the vision. These reflexions, as I say, quickened his generosity; yet, make them as he might, he saw himself, with the lapse of the period, more and more disconcerted. It lapsed for him with a strange steady sweep, and the oddest oddity was that it gave him, independently of the threat of much inconvenience, almost the only positive surprise his career, if career it could be called, had yet offered him. She kept the house as she had never done; he had to go to her to see her--she could meet him nowhere now, though there was scarce a corner of their loved old London in which she hadn't in the past, at one time or another, done so; and he found her always seated by her fire in the deep old-fashioned chair she was less and less able to leave. He had been struck one day, after an absence exceeding his usual measure, with her suddenly looking much older to him than he had ever thought of her being; then he recognised that the suddenness was all on his side--he had just simply and suddenly noticed. She looked older because inevitably, after so many years, she was old, or almost; which was of course true in still greater measure of her companion. If she was old, or almost, John Marcher assuredly was, and yet it was her showing of the lesson, not his own, that brought the truth home to him. His surprises began here; when once they had begun they multiplied; they came rather with a rush: it was as if, in the oddest way in the world, they had all been kept back, sown in a thick cluster, for the late afternoon of life, the time at which for people in general the unexpected has died out.

One of them was that he should have caught himself--for he had so done--really wondering if the great accident would take form now as nothing more than his being condemned to see this charming woman, this admirable friend, pass away from him. He had never so unreservedly qualified her as while confronted in thought with such a possibility; in spite of which there was small doubt for him that as an answer to his long riddle the mere effacement of even so fine a feature of his situation would be an abject anticlimax. It would represent, as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the shadow of which his existence could only become the most grotesques of failures. He had been far from holding it a failure- -long as he had waited for the appearance that was to make it a success. He had waited for quite another thing, not for such a thing as that. The breath of his good faith came short, however, as he recognised how long he had waited, or how long at least his companion had. That she, at all events, might be recorded as having waited in vain--this affected him sharply, and all the more because of his it first having done little more than amuse himself with the idea. It grew more grave as the gravity of her condition grew, and the state of mind it produced in him, which he himself ended by watching as if it had been some definite disfigurement of his outer person, may pass for another of his surprises. This conjoined itself still with another, the really stupefying consciousness of a question that he would have allowed to shape itself had he dared. What did everything mean--what, that is, did she mean, she and her vain waiting and her probable death and the soundless admonition of it all--unless that, at this time of day, it was simply, it was overwhelmingly too late? He had never at any stage of his queer consciousness admitted the whisper of such a correction; he had never till within these last few months been so false to his conviction as not to hold that what was to come to him had time, whether he struck himself as having it or not. That at last, at last, he certainly hadn't it, to speak of, or had it but in the scantiest measure--such, soon enough, as things went with him, became the inference with which his old obsession had to reckon: and this it was not helped to do by the more and more confirmed appearance that the great vagueness casting the long shadow in which he had lived had, to attest itself, almost no margin left. Since it was in Time that he was to have met his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have acted; and as he waked up to the sense of no longer being young, which was exactly the sense of being stale, just as that, in turn, was the sense of being weak, he waked up to another matter beside. It all hung together; they were subject, he and the great vagueness, to an equal and indivisible law. When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything. And so, in the dark valley into which his path had taken its unlooked-for twist, he wondered not a little as he groped. He didn't care what awful crash might overtake him, with what ignominy or what monstrosity he might yet he associated--since he wasn't after all too utterly old to suffer--if it would only be decently proportionate to the posture he had kept, all his life, in the threatened presence of it. He had but one desire left--that he shouldn't have been "sold."