He had repeated the announcement in a tone of almost impersonal discretion, like a man who expected very little from it but who spoke for his own needed relief. The tears came into her eyes: this time they obeyed the sharpness of the pang that suggested to her somehow the slipping of a fine bolt—backward, forward, she couldn’t have said which. The words he had uttered made him, as he stood there, beautiful and generous, invested him as with the golden air of early autumn; but, morally speaking, she retreated before them—facing him still—as she had retreated in the other cases before a like encounter. ‘Oh don’t say that, please,’ she answered with an intensity that expressed the dread of having, in this case too, to choose and decide. What made her dread great was precisely the force which, as it would seem, ought to have banished all dread—the sense of something within herself, deep down, that she supposed to be inspired and trustful passion. It was there like a large sum stored in a bank—which there was a terror in having to begin to spend. If she touched it, it would all come out.

‘I haven’t the idea that it will matter much to you,’ said Osmond. ‘I’ve too little to offer you. What I have—it’s enough for me; but it’s not enough for you. I’ve neither fortune, nor fame, nor extrinsic advantages of any kind. So I offer nothing. I only tell you because I think it can’t offend you, and some day or other it may give you pleasure. It gives me pleasure, I assure you,’ he went on, standing there before her, considerately inclined to her, turning his hat, which he had taken up, slowly round with a movement which had all the decent tremor of awkwardness and none of its oddity, and presenting to her his firm, refined, slightly ravaged face. ‘It gives me no pain, because it’s perfectly simple. For me you’ll always be the most important woman in the world.’

Isabel looked at herself in the character—looked intently, thinking she filled it with a certain grace. But what she said was not an expression of any such complacency. ‘You don’t offend me; but you ought to remember that, without being offended, one may be incommoded, troubled.’ ‘Incommoded’: she heard herself saying that, and it struck her as a ridiculous word. But it was what stupidly came to her.

‘I remember perfectly. Of course you’re surprised and startled. But if it’s nothing but that, it will pass away. And it will perhaps leave something that I may not be ashamed of.’

‘I don’t know what it may leave. You see at all events that I’m not overwhelmed,’ said Isabel with rather a pale smile. ‘I’m not too troubled to think. And I think that I’m glad we’re separating—that I leave Rome to-morrow.’

‘Of course I don’t agree with you there.’

‘I don’t at all know you,’ she added abruptly; and then she coloured as she heard herself saying what she had said almost a year before to Lord Warburton.

‘If you were not going away you’d know me better.’

‘I shall do that some other time.’

‘I hope so. I’m very easy to know.’

‘No, no,’ she emphatically answered—‘there you’re not sincere. You’re not easy to know; no one could be less so.’

‘Well,’ he laughed, ‘I said that because I know myself. It may be a boast, but I do.’

‘Very likely; but you’re very wise.’

‘So are you, Miss Archer!’ Osmond exclaimed.

‘I don’t feel so just now. Still, I’m wise enough to think you had better go. Good-night.’