reason to believe none the less that as she advanced in life
she made more of those concessions to the sense of something obscurely
distinct from convenience--more of them than she independently exacted.
She was learning to sacrifice consistency to considerations of that
inferior order for which the excuse must be found in the particular
case. It was not to the credit of her absolute rectitude that she should
have gone the longest way round to Florence in order to spend a few
weeks with her invalid son; since in former years it had been one of her
most definite convictions that when Ralph wished to see her he was at
liberty to remember that Palazzo Crescentini contained a large apartment
known as the quarter of the signorino.

"I want to ask you something," Isabel said to this young man the day
after her arrival at San Remo--"something I've thought more than once
of asking you by letter, but that I've hesitated on the whole to write
about. Face to face, nevertheless, my question seems easy enough. Did
you know your father intended to leave me so much money?"

Ralph stretched his legs a little further than usual and gazed a little
more fixedly at the Mediterranean.

"What does it matter, my dear Isabel, whether I knew? My father was very
obstinate."

"So," said the girl, "you did know."

"Yes; he told me. We even talked it over a little." "What did he do it
for?" asked Isabel abruptly. "Why, as a kind of compliment."

"A compliment on what?"

"On your so beautifully existing."

"He liked me too much," she presently declared.

"That's a way we all have."

"If I believed that I should be very unhappy. Fortunately I don't
believe it. I want to be treated with justice; I want nothing but that."

"Very good. But you must remember that justice to a lovely being is
after all a florid sort of sentiment."

"I'm not a lovely being. How can you say that, at the very moment when
I'm asking such odious questions? I must seem to you delicate!"

"You seem to me troubled," said Ralph.

"I am troubled."

"About what?"

For a moment she answered nothing; then she broke out: "Do you think it
good for me suddenly to be made so rich? Henrietta doesn't."

"Oh, hang Henrietta!" said Ralph coarsely, "If you ask me I'm delighted
at it."

"Is that why your father did it--for your amusement?"

"I differ with Miss Stackpole," Ralph went on more gravely. "I think it
very good for you to have means."

Isabel looked at him wi