When Madame Catherine had left them together Pansy kneeled down and hid her head in her stepmother’s lap. So she remained some moments, while Isabel gently stroked her hair. Then she got up, averting her face and looking about the room. ‘Don’t you think I’ve arranged it well? I’ve everything I have at home.’

‘It’s very pretty; you’re very comfortable.’ Isabel scarcely knew what she could say to her. On the one hand she couldn’t let her think she had come to pity her, and on the other it would be a dull mockery to pretend to rejoice with her. So she simply added after a moment: ‘I’ve come to bid you good-bye. I’m going to England.’

Pansy’s white little face turned red. ‘To England! Not to come back?’

‘I don’t know when I shall come back.’

‘Ah, I’m sorry,’ Pansy breathed with faintness. She spoke as if she had no right to criticize; but her tone expressed a depth of disappointment.

‘My cousin, Mr Touchett, is very ill; he’ll probably die. I wish to see him,’ Isabel said.

‘Ah yes; you told me he would die. Of course you must go. And will papa go?’

‘No; I shall go alone.’

For a moment the girl said nothing. Isabel had often wondered what she thought of the apparent relations of her father with his wife; but never by a glance, by an intimation, had she let it be seen that she deemed them deficient in an air of intimacy. She made her reflexions, Isabel was sure; and she must have had a conviction that there were husbands and wives who were more intimate than that. But Pansy was not indiscreet even in thought; she would as little have ventured to judge her gentle stepmother as to criticize her magnificent father. Her heart may have stood almost as still as it would have done had she seen two of the saints in the great picture in the convent-chapel turn their painted heads and shake them at each other. But as in this latter case she would (for very solemnity’s sake) never have mentioned the awful phenomenon, so she put away all knowledge of the secrets of larger lives than her own. ‘You’ll be very far away,’ she presently went on.

‘Yes; I shall be far away. But it will scarcely matter,’ Isabel explained; ‘since so long as you’re here I can’t be called near you.’

‘Yes, but you can come and see me; though you’ve not come very often.’

‘I’ve not come because your father forbade it. To-day I bring nothing with me. I can’t amuse you.’

‘I’m not to be amused. That’s not what papa wishes.’

‘Then it hardly matters whether I’m in Rome or in England.’

‘You’re not happy, Mrs Osmond,’ said Pansy.

‘Not very. But it doesn’t matter.’

‘That’s what I say to myself. What does it matter? But I should like to come out.’

‘I wish indeed you might.’

‘Don’t leave me here,’ Pansy went on gently.

Isabel said nothing for a minute; her heart beat fast. ‘Will you come away with me now?’ she asked.