--it's enough for me; but it's not
enough for you. I've neither fortune, nor fame, nor extrinsic advantages
of any kind. So I offer nothing. I only tell you because I think it
can't offend you, and some day or other it may give you pleasure. It
gives me pleasure, I assure you," he went on, standing there before her,
considerately inclined to her, turning his hat, which he had taken
up, slowly round with a movement which had all the decent tremor of
awkwardness and none of its oddity, and presenting to her his firm,
refined, slightly ravaged face. "It gives me no pain, because it's
perfectly simple. For me you'll always be the most important woman in
the world."

Isabel looked at herself in this character--looked intently, thinking
she filled it with a certain grace. But what she said was not an
expression of any such complacency. "You don't offend me; but you
ought to remember that, without being offended, one may be incommoded,
troubled." "Incommoded," she heard herself saying that, and it struck
her as a ridiculous word. But it was what stupidly came to her.

"I remember perfectly. Of course you're surprised and startled. But
if it's nothing but that, it will pass away. And it will perhaps leave
something that I may not be ashamed of."

"I don't know what it may leave. You see at all events that I'm not
overwhelmed," said Isabel with rather a pale smile. "I'm not too
troubled to think. And I think that I'm glad I leave Rome to-morrow."

"Of course I don't agree with you there."

"I don't at all KNOW you," she added abruptly; and then she coloured as
she heard herself saying what she had said almost a year before to Lord
Warburton.

"If you were not going away you'd know me better."

"I shall do that some other time."

"I hope so. I'm very easy to know."

"No, no," she emphatically answered--"there you're not sincere. You're
not easy to know; no one could be less so."

"Well," he laughed, "I said that because I know myself. It may be a
boast, but I do."

"Very likely; but you're very wise."

"So are you, Miss Archer!" Osmond exclaimed.

"I don't feel so just now. Still, I'm wise enough to think you had
better go. Good-night."

"God bless you!" said Gilbert Osmond, taking the hand which she failed
to surrender. After which he added: "If we meet again you'll find me as
you leave me. If we don't I shall be so all the same."

"Thank you very much. Good-bye."

There was something quietly firm about Isab