‘Not very. I shall still be a great friend of yours. You’ll see.’

‘That will make it all the worse,’ said Mr Goodwood grimly.

‘Ah, you’re unaccommodating! I can’t promise to dislike you in order to help you to resign yourself.’

‘I shouldn’t care if you did!’

Isabel got up with a movement of repressed impatience and walked to the window, where she remained a moment looking out. When she turned round her visitor was still motionless in his place. She came toward him again and stopped, resting her hand on the back of the chair she had just quitted. ‘Do you mean you came simply to look at me? That’s better for you perhaps than for me.’

‘I wished to hear the sound of your voice,’ he said.

‘You’ve heard it, and you see it says nothing very sweet.’

‘It gives me pleasure, all the same.’ And with this he got up.

She had felt pain and displeasure on receiving early that day the news he was in Florence and by her leave would come within an hour to see her. She had been vexed and distressed, though she had sent back word by his messenger that he might come when he would. She had not been better pleased when she saw him; his being there at all was so full of heavy implications. It implied things she could never assent to—rights, reproaches, remonstrance, rebuke, the expectation of making her change her purpose. These things, however, if implied, had not been expressed; and now our young lady, strangely enough, began to resent her visitor’s remarkable self-control. There was a dumb misery about him that irritated her; there was a manly staying of his hand that made her heart beat faster. She felt her agitation rising, and she said to herself that she was angry in the way a woman is angry when she has been in the wrong. She was not in the wrong; she had fortunately not that bitterness to swallow; but, all the same, she wished he would denounce her a little. She had wished his visit would be short; it had no purpose, no propriety; yet now that he seemed to be turning away she felt a sudden horror of his leaving her without uttering a word that would give her an opportunity to defend herself more than she had done in writing to him a month before, in a few carefully chosen words, to announce her engagement. If she were not in the wrong, however, why should she desire to defend herself? It was an excess of generosity on Isabel’s part to desire that Mr Goodwood should be angry. And if he had not meanwhile held himself hard it might have made him so to hear the tone in which she suddenly exclaimed, as if she were accusing him of having accused her: ‘I’ve not deceived you! I was perfectly free!’

‘Yes, I know that,’ said Caspar.

‘I gave you full warning that I’d do as I chose.’

‘You said you’d probably never marry, and you said it with such a manner that I pretty well believed it.’

She considered this an instant. ‘No one can be more surprised than myself at my present intention.’

‘You told me that if I heard you were engaged I was not to believe it,’ Caspar went on. ‘I heard it twenty days ago from yourself, but I remembered what you had said. I thought there might be some mistake, and that’s partly why I came.’

‘If you wish me to repeat it by word of mouth, that’s soon done. There’s no mistake whatever.’

‘I saw that as soon as I came into the room.’

‘What good would it do you that I shouldn’t marry?’ she asked with a certain fierceness.