ou 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,