LITMIR.BIZ

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he then asked in a quick, full, slightly peremptory tone — the tone of a man whose questions were habitually pointed and who was capable of much insistence.

      She answered by a ready question, “How did you know I was here?”

      “Miss Stackpole let me know,” said Caspar Goodwood. “She told me you would probably be at home alone this evening and would be willing to see me.”

      “Where did she see you — to tell you that?”

      “She didn’t see me; she wrote to me.”

      Isabel was silent; neither had sat down; they stood there with an air of defiance, or at least of contention. “Henrietta never told me she was writing to you,” she said at last. “This is not kind of her.”

      “Is it so disagreeable to you to see me?” asked the young man.

      “I didn’t expect it. I don’t like such surprises.”

      “But you knew I was in town; it was natural we should meet.”

      “Do you call this meeting? I hoped I shouldn’t see you. In so big a place as London it seemed very possible.”

      “It was apparently repugnant to you even to write to me,” her visitor went on.

      Isabel made no reply; the sense of Henrietta Stackpole’s treachery, as she momentarily qualified it, was strong within her. “Henrietta’s certainly not a model of all the delicacies!” she exclaimed with bitterness. “It was a great liberty to take.”

      “I suppose I’m not a model either — of those virtues or of any others. The fault’s mine as much as hers.”

      As Isabel looked at him it seemed to her that his jaw had never been more square. This might have displeased her, but she took a different turn. “No, it’s not your fault so much as hers. What you’ve done was inevitable, I suppose, for you.”

      “It was indeed!” cried Caspar Goodwood with a voluntary laugh.

      “And now that I’ve come, at any rate, mayn’t I stay?”

      “You may sit down, certainly.”

      She went back to her chair again, while her visitor took the first place that offered, in the manner of a man accustomed to pay little thought to that sort of furtherance. “I’ve been hoping every day for an answer to my letter. You might have written me a few lines.”

      “It wasn’t the trouble of writing that prevented me; I could as easily have written you four pages as one. But my silence was an intention,” Isabel said. “I thought it the best thing.”

      He sat with his eyes fixed on hers while she spoke; then he lowered them and attached them to a spot in the carpet as if he were making a strong effort to say nothing but what he ought. He was a strong man in the wrong, and he was acute enough to see that an uncompromising exhibition of his strength would only throw the falsity of his position into relief. Isabel was not incapable of tasting any advantage of position over a person of this quality, and though little desirous to flaunt it in his face she could enjoy being able to say “You know you oughtn’t to have written to me yourself!” and to say it with an air of triumph.

      Caspar Goodwood raised his eyes to her own again; they seemed to shine through the vizard of a helmet. He had a strong sense of justice and was ready any day in the year — over and above this — to argue the question of his rights. “You said you hoped never to hear from me again; I know that. But I never accepted any such rule as my own. I warned you that you should hear very soon.”

      “I didn’t say I hoped NEVER to hear from you,” said Isabel.

      “Not for five years then; for ten years; twenty years. It’s the same thing.”

      “Do you find it so? It seems to me there’s a great difference. I can imagine that at the end of ten years we might have a very pleasant correspondence. I shall have matured my epistolary style.”

      She looked away while she spoke these words, knowing them of so much less earnest a cast than the countenance of her listener. Her eyes, however, at last came back to him, just as he said very irrelevantly; “Are you enjoying your visit to your uncle?”

      “Very much indeed.” She dropped, but then she broke out. “What good do you expect to get by insisting?”

      “The good of not losing you.”

      “You’ve no right to talk of losing what’s not yours. And even from your own point of view,” Isabel added, “you ought to know when to let one alone.”

      “I disgust you very much,” said Caspar Goodwood gloomily; not as if to provoke her to compassion for a man conscious of this blighting fact, but as if to set it well before himself, so that he might endeavour to act with his eyes on it.

      “Yes, you don’t at all delight me, you don’t fit in, not in any way, just now, and the worst is that your putting it to the proof in this manner is quite unnecessary.” It wasn’t certainly as if his nature had been soft, so that pin-pricks would draw blood from it; and from the first of her acquaintance with him, and of her having to defend herself against a certain air that he had of knowing better what was good for her than she knew herself, she had recognised the fact that perfect frankness was her best weapon. To attempt to spare his sensibility or to escape from him edgewise, as one might do from a man who had barred the way less sturdily — this, in dealing with Caspar Goodwood, who would grasp at everything of every sort that one might give him, was wasted agility. It was not that he had not susceptibilities, but his passive surface, as well as his active, was large and hard, and he might always be trusted to dress his wounds, so far as they required it, himself. She came back, even for her measure of possible pangs and aches in him, to her old sense that he was naturally plated and steeled, armed essentially for aggression.

      “I can’t reconcile myself to that,” he simply said. There was a dangerous liberality about it; for she felt how open it was to him to make the point that he had not always disgusted her.

      “I can’t reconcile myself to it either, and it’s not the state of things that ought to exist between us. If you’d only try to banish me from your mind for a few months we should be on good terms again.”

      “I see. If I should cease to think of you at all for a prescribed time, I should find I could keep it up indefinitely.”

      “Indefinitely is more than I ask. It’s more even than I should like.”

      “You know that what you ask is impossible,” said the young man, taking his adjective for granted in a manner she found irritating.

      “Aren’t you capable of making a calculated effort?” she demanded. “You’re strong for everything else; why shouldn’t you be strong for that?”

      “An effort calculated for what?” And then as she hung fire, “I’m capable of nothing with regard to you,” he went on, “but just of being infernally in love with you. If one’s strong one loves only the more strongly.”

      “There’s a good deal in that;” and indeed our young lady felt the force of it — felt it thrown off, into the vast of truth and poetry, as practically a bait to her imagination. But she promptly came round. “Think of me or not, as you find most possible; only leave me alone.”

      “Until when?”

      “Well, for a year or two.”

      “Which do you mean? Between one year and two there’s all the difference in the world.”

      “Call it two then,” said Isabel with a studied effect of eagerness.

      “And what shall I gain by that?” her friend asked with no sign of wincing.

      “You’ll have obliged me greatly.”

      “And what will be my reward?”

      “Do you need a reward for an act of generosity?”

      “Yes,

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