f so what comfort did he
expect to derive from it? If he was in love with Pansy he was not in
love with her stepmother, and if he was in love with her stepmother
he was not in love with Pansy. Was she to cultivate the advantage she
possessed in order to make him commit himself to Pansy, knowing he would
do so for her sake and not for the small creature's own--was this the
service her husband had asked of her? This at any rate was the duty
with which she found herself confronted--from the moment she admitted to
herself that her old friend had still an uneradicated predilection for
her society. It was not an agreeable task; it was in fact a repulsive
one. She asked herself with dismay whether Lord Warburton were
pretending to be in love with Pansy in order to cultivate another
satisfaction and what might be called other chances. Of this refinement
of duplicity she presently acquitted him; she preferred to believe him
in perfect good faith. But if his admiration for Pansy were a delusion
this was scarcely better than its being an affectation. Isabel wandered
among these ugly possibilities until she had completely lost her way;
some of them, as she suddenly encountered them, seemed ugly enough. Then
she broke out of the labyrinth, rubbing her eyes, and declared that her
imagination surely did her little honour and that her husband's did him
even less. Lord Warburton was as disinterested as he need be, and she
was no more to him than she need wish. She would rest upon this till
the contrary should be proved; proved more effectually than by a cynical
intimation of Osmond's.

Such a resolution, however, brought her this evening but little peace,
for her soul was haunted with terrors which crowded to the foreground of
thought as quickly as a place was made for them. What had suddenly set
them into livelier motion she hardly knew, unless it were the strange
impression she had received in the afternoon of her husband's being in
more direct communication with Madame Merle than she suspected. That
impression came back to her from time to time, and now she wondered it
had never come before. Besides this, her short interview with Osmond
half an hour ago was a striking example of his faculty for making
everything wither that he touched, spoiling everything for her that he
looked at. It was very well to undertake to give him a proof of loyalty;
the real fact was that the knowledge of his expecting a thing raised a
presumption against i