she was indulging her
thirst for knowledge in this way, a noise which she feared was an
approaching footstep alarmed her: she closed the door and attempted
hurriedly to lock it, but failing and not daring to linger, she
withdrew the key and trusted that the panel would stick, as it seemed
well inclined to do. In this confidence she had returned the key to its
former place, stilling any anxiety by the thought that if the door were
discovered to be unlocked nobody would know how the unlocking came
about. The inconvenient Isabel, like other offenders, did not foresee
her own impulse to confession, a fatality which came upon her the
morning after the party, when Gwendolen said at the breakfast-table, "I
know the door was locked before the housekeeper gave me the key, for I
tried it myself afterward. Some one must have been to my drawer and
taken the key."

It seemed to Isabel that Gwendolen's awful eyes had rested on her more
than on the other sisters, and without any time for resolve, she said,
with a trembling lip:

"Please forgive me, Gwendolen."

The forgiveness was sooner bestowed than it would have been if
Gwendolen had not desired to dismiss from her own and every one else's
memory any case in which she had shown her susceptibility to terror.
She wondered at herself in these occasional experiences, which seemed
like a brief remembered madness, an unexplained exception from her
normal life; and in this instance she felt a peculiar vexation that her
helpless fear had shown itself, not, as usual, in solitude, but in
well-lit company. Her ideal was to be daring in speech and reckless in
braving dangers, both moral and physical; and though her practice fell
far behind her ideal, this shortcoming seemed to be due to the
pettiness of circumstances, the narrow theatre which life offers to a
girl of twenty, who cannot conceive herself as anything else than a
lady, or as in any position which would lack the tribute of respect.
She had no permanent consciousness of other fetters, or of more
spiritual restraints, having always disliked whatever was presented to
her under the name of religion, in the same way that some people
dislike arithmetic and accounts: it had raised no other emotion in her,
no alarm, no longing; so that the question whether she believed it had
not occurred to her any more than it had occurred to her to inquire
into the conditions of colonial property and banking, on which, as she
had had many opportuni