Isabel had listened eagerly; her face was full of pain and wonder. ‘My aunt does that at fixed periods and lets nothing turn her aside. When the date comes round she starts; I think she’d have started if Ralph had been dying.’

‘I sometimes think he is dying,’ Lord Warburton said.

Isabel sprang up. ‘I’ll go to him then now.’

He checked her; he was a little disconcerted at the quick effect of his words. ‘I don’t mean I thought so to-night. On the contrary, to-day, in the train, he seemed particularly well; the idea of our reaching Rome—he’s very fond of Rome, you know—gave him strength. An hour ago, when I bade him good- night, he told me he was very tired, but very happy. Go to him in the morning; that’s all I mean. I didn’t tell him I was coming here; I didn’t decide to till after we had separated. Then I remembered he had told me you had an evening, and that it was this very Thursday. It occurred to me to come in and tell you he’s here, and let you know you had perhaps better not wait for him to call. I think he said he hadn’t written to you.’ There was no need of Isabel’s declaring that she would act upon Lord Warburton’s information; she looked, as she sat there, like a winged creature held back. ‘Let alone that I wanted to see you for myself,’ her visitor gallantly added.

‘I don’t understand Ralph’s plan; it seems to me very wild,’ she said. ‘I was glad to think of him between those thick walls at Gardencourt.’

‘He was completely alone there; the thick walls were his only company.’

‘You went to see him; you’ve been extremely kind.’

‘Oh dear, I had nothing to do,’ said Lord Warburton.

‘We hear, on the contrary, that you’re doing great things. Every one speaks of you as a great statesman, and I’m perpetually seeing your name in the Times, which, by the way, doesn’t appear to hold it in reverence. You’re apparently as wild a radical as ever.’

‘I don’t feel nearly so wild; you know the world has come round to me. Touchett and I have kept up a sort of parliamentary debate all the way from London. I tell him he’s the last of the Tories, and he calls me the King of the Goths¹—says I have, down to the details of my personal appearance, every sign of the brute. So you see there’s life in him yet.’

Isabel had many questions to ask about Ralph, but she abstained from asking them all. She would see for herself on the morrow. She perceived that after a little Lord Warburton would tire of that subject—he had a conception of other possible topics. She was more and more able to say to herself that he had recovered, and, what is more to the point, she was able to say it without bitterness. He had been for her, of old, such an image of urgency, of insistence, of something to be resisted and reasoned with, that his reappearance at first menaced her with a new trouble. But she was now reassured; she could see he only wished to live with her on good terms, that she was to understand he had forgiven her and was incapable of the bad taste of making pointed allusions. This was not a form of revenge, of course; she had no suspicion of his wishing to punish her by an exhibition of disillusionment; she did him the justice to believe it had simply occurred to him that she would now take a good-natured interest in knowing he was resigned. It was the resignation of a healthy, manly nature, in which sentimental wounds could never fester. British politics had cured him; she had known they would. She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action. Lord Warburton of course spoke of the past, but he spoke of it without implications; he even went so far as to allude to their former meeting in Rome as a very jolly time. And he told her he had been immensely interested in hearing of her marriage and that it was a great pleasure for him to make Mr Osmond’s acquaintance—since he could hardly be said to have made it on the other occasion. He had not written to her at the time of that passage in her history, but he didn’t apologize to her for this. The only thing he implied was