if the principal factor was not to be mentioned? These contradictions were themselves but an indication of her trouble, and her cry for help, just before, was the only thing he was bound to consider. ‘You’ll be decidedly at variance, all the same,’ he said in a moment. And as she answered nothing, looking as if she scarce understood, ‘You’ll find yourselves thinking very differently,’ he continued.

‘That may easily happen, among the most united couples!’ She took up her parasol; he saw she was nervous, afraid of what he might say. ‘It’s a matter we can hardly quarrel about, however,’ she added; ‘for almost all the interest is on his side. That’s very natural. Pansy’s after all his daughter—not mine.’ And she put out her hand to wish him good-bye.

Ralph took an inward resolution that she shouldn’t leave him without his letting her know that he knew everything: it seemed too great an opportunity to lose. ‘Do you know what his interest will make him say?’ he asked as he took her hand. She shook her head, rather dryly—not discouragingly—and he went on. ‘It will make him say that your want of zeal is owing to jealousy.’ He stopped a moment; her face made him afraid.

‘To jealousy?’

‘To jealousy of his daughter.’

She blushed red and threw back her head. ‘You’re not kind,’ she said in a voice that he had never heard on her lips.

‘Be frank with me and you’ll see,’ he answered.

But she made no reply; she only pulled her hand out of his own, which he tried still to hold, and rapidly withdrew from the room. She made up her mind to speak to Pansy, and she took an occasion on the same day, going to the girl’s room before dinner. Pansy was already dressed; she was always in advance of the time: it seemed to illustrate her pretty patience and the graceful stillness with which she could sit and wait. At present she was seated, in her fresh array, before the bed-room fire; she had blown out her candles on the completion of her toilet, in accordance with the economical habits in which she had been brought up and which she was no more careful than ever to observe; so that the room was lighted only by a couple of logs. The rooms in Palazzo Roccanera were as spacious as they were numerous, and Pansy’s virginal bower was an immense chamber with a dark, heavily-timbered ceiling. Its diminutive mistress, in the midst of it, appeared but a speck of humanity, and as she got up, with quick deference, to welcome Isabel, the latter was more than ever struck with her shy sincerity. Isabel had a difficult task—the only thing was to perform it as simply as possible. She felt bitter and angry, but she warned herself against betraying this heat. She was afraid even of looking too grave, or at least too stern; she was afraid of causing alarm. But Pansy seemed to have guessed she had come more or less as a confessor; for after she had moved the chair in which she had been sitting a little nearer to the fire and Isabel had taken her place in it, she kneeled down on a cushion in front of her, looking up and resting her clasped hands on her stepmother’s knees. What Isabel wished to do was to hear from her own lips that her mind was not occupied with Lord Warburton; but if she desired the assurance she felt herself by no means at liberty to provoke it. The girl’s father would have qualified this as rank treachery; and indeed Isabel knew that if Pansy should display the smallest germ of a disposition to encourage Lord Warburton her own duty was to hold her tongue. It was difficult to interrogate without appearing to suggest; Pansy’s supreme simplicity, an innocence even more complete than Isabel had yet judged it, gave to the most tentative enquiry something of the effect of an admonition. As she knelt there in the vague firelight, with her pretty dress dimly shining, her hands folded half in appeal and half in submission, her soft eyes, raised and fixed, full of the seriousness of the situation, she looked to Isabel like a childish martyr decked out for sacrifice and scarcely presuming even to hope to avert it. When Isabel said to her that she had never yet spoken to her of what might have been going on in relation to her getting married, but that her silence had not been indifference or ignorance, had only been the desire to leave her at liberty, Pansy bent forward, raised her face nearer and nearer, and with a little murmur which evidently expressed a