th quick deference, to welcome Isabel,
the latter was more than ever struck with her shy sincerity. Isabel
had a difficult task--the only thing was to perform it as simply as
possible. She felt bitter and angry, but she warned herself against
betraying this heat. She was afraid even of looking too grave, or at
least too stern; she was afraid of causing alarm. Put Pansy seemed to
have guessed she had come more or less as a confessor; for after she
had moved the chair in which she had been sitting a little nearer to the
fire and Isabel had taken her place in it, she kneeled down on a
cushion in front of her, looking up and resting her clasped hands on her
stepmother's knees. What Isabel wished to do was to hear from her own
lips that her mind was not occupied with Lord Warburton; but if she
desired the assurance she felt herself by no means at liberty to provoke
it. The girl's father would have qualified this as rank treachery; and
indeed Isabel knew that if Pansy should display the smallest germ of
a disposition to encourage Lord Warburton her own duty was to hold her
tongue. It was difficult to interrogate without appearing to suggest;
Pansy's supreme simplicity, an innocence even more complete than Isabel
had yet judged it, gave to the most tentative enquiry something of the
effect of an admonition. As she knelt there in the vague firelight, with
her pretty dress dimly shining, her hands folded half in appeal and half
in submission, her soft eyes, raised and fixed, full of the seriousness
of the situation, she looked to Isabel like a childish martyr decked
out for sacrifice and scarcely presuming even to hope to avert it. When
Isabel said to her that she had never yet spoken to her of what might
have been going on in relation to her getting married, but that her
silence had not been indifference or ignorance, had only been the desire
to leave her at liberty, Pansy bent forward, raised her face nearer
and nearer, and with a little murmur which evidently expressed a deep
longing, answered that she had greatly wished her to speak and that she
begged her to advise her now.

"It's difficult for me to advise you," Isabel returned. "I don't know
how I can undertake that. That's for your father; you must get his
advice and, above all, you must act on it."

At this Pansy dropped her eyes; for a moment she said nothing. "I think
I should like your advice better than papa's," she presently remarked.

"That's not as it should be