id, "only I'm afraid 'as usual'
isn't particularly well. Sydney and Amelia had been up to Paris in the
spring, but she hadn't seen them. Somebody told her they were there, it
seems. They'd left Florence and were living in Rome; Amelia's become a
Catholic and is said to give great sums to charity and to go about
with the gentry in consequence, but Sydney's ailing and lives in a
wheel-chair most of the time. It struck me Isabel ought to be doing the
same thing."

He paused, bestowing minute care upon the removal of the little band
from his cigar; and as he seemed to have concluded his narrative, Eugene
spoke out of the shadow beyond a heavily shaded lamp: "What do you mean
by that?" he asked quietly.

"Oh, she's cheerful enough," said Amberson, still not looking at either
his young hostess or her father. "At least," he added, "she manages to
seem so. I'm afraid she hasn't been really well for several years. She
isn't stout you know--she hasn't changed in looks much--and she seems
rather alarmingly short of breath for a slender person. Father's been
that way for years, of course; but never nearly so much as Isabel is
now. Of course she makes nothing of it, but it seemed rather serious to
me when I noticed she had to stop and rest twice to get up the one short
flight of stairs in their two-floor apartment. I told her I thought she
ought to make George let her come home."

"Let her?" Eugene repeated, in a low voice. "Does she want to?"

"She doesn't urge it. George seems to like the life there-in his grand,
gloomy, and peculiar way; and of course she'll never change about being
proud of him and all that--he's quite a swell. But in spite of anything
she said, rather than because, I know she does indeed want to come.
She'd like to be with father, of course; and I think she's--well, she
intimated one day that she feared it might even happen that she wouldn't
get to see him again. At the time I thought she referred to his age and
feebleness, but on the boat, coming home, I remembered the little look
of wistfulness, yet of resignation, with which she said it, and it
struck me all at once that I'd been mistaken: I saw she was really
thinking of her own state of health."

"I see," Eugene said, his voice even lower than it had been before. "And
you say he won't 'let' her come home?"

Amberson laughed, but still continued to be interested in his cigar.
"Oh, I don't think he uses force! He's very gentle with her. I doubt
if the