and free in her movement that her very pliancy seemed to mock at him. Her eyes, however, saw nothing; they had suddenly been suffused with tears. In a moment he followed her, and by this time she had brushed her tears away; but when she turned round her face was pale and the expression of her eyes strange. ‘That reason that I wouldn’t tell you—I’ll tell it you after all. It’s that I can’t escape my fate.’

‘Your fate?’

‘I should try to escape it if I were to marry you.’

‘I don’t understand. Why should not that be your fate as well as anything else?’

‘Because it’s not,’ said Isabel femininely. ‘I know it’s not. It’s not my fate to give up—I know it can’t be.’

Poor Lord Warburton stared, an interrogative point in either eye. ‘Do you call marrying me giving up?’

‘Not in the usual sense. It’s getting—getting—getting a great deal. But it’s giving up other chances.’

‘Other chances for what?’

‘I don’t mean chances to marry,’ said Isabel, her colour quickly coming back to her. And then she stopped, looking down with a deep frown, as if it were hopeless to attempt to make her meaning clear.

‘I don’t think it presumptuous in me to suggest that you’ll gain more than you’ll lose,’ her companion observed.

‘I can’t escape unhappiness,’ said Isabel. ‘In marrying you I shall be trying to.’

‘I don’t know whether you’d try to, but you certainly would: that I must in candour admit!’ he exclaimed with an anxious laugh.

‘I mustn’t—I can’t!’ cried the girl.

‘Well, if you’re bent on being miserable I don’t see why you should make me so. Whatever charms a life of misery may have for you, it has none for me.’

‘I’m not bent on a life of misery,’ said Isabel. ‘I’ve always been intensely determined to be happy, and I’ve often believed I should be. I’ve told people that; you can ask them. But it comes over me every now and then that I can never be happy in any extraordinary way; not by turning away, by separating myself.’

‘By separating yourself from what?’

‘From life. From the usual chances and dangers, from what most people know and suffer.’

Lord Warburton broke into a smile that almost denoted hope. ‘Why, my dear Miss Archer,’ he began to explain with the most considerate eagerness, ‘I don’t offer you any exoneration from life or from any chances or dangers whatever. I wish I could; depend upon it I would! For what do you take me, pray? Heaven help me, I’m not the Emperor of China! All I offer you is the chance of taking the common lot in a comfortable sort of way. The common lot? Why, I’m devoted to the common lot! Strike an alliance with me, and I promise you that you shall have plenty of it. You shall separate from nothing whatever—not even from your friend Miss Stackpole.’

‘She’d never approve of it,’ said Isabel, trying to smile and take advantage of this side-issue; despising herself too, not a little, for doing so.

‘Are we speaking of Miss Stackpole?’ his lordship asked impatiently. ‘I never saw a person judge things on such theoretic grounds.’