ctively to this elusive point, but
every now and then it was checked by a nameless dread, so that when
the charming woman was away from Rome she had almost a consciousness
of respite. She had already learned from Miss Stackpole that Caspar
Goodwood was in Europe, Henrietta having written to make it known to
her immediately after meeting him in Paris. He himself never wrote to
Isabel, and though he was in Europe she thought it very possible he
might not desire to see her. Their last interview, before her marriage,
had had quite the character of a complete rupture; if she remembered
rightly he had said he wished to take his last look at her. Since then
he had been the most discordant survival of her earlier time--the only
one in fact with which a permanent pain was associated. He had left her
that morning with a sense of the most superfluous of shocks: it was like
a collision between vessels in broad daylight. There had been no mist,
no hidden current to excuse it, and she herself had only wished to steer
wide. He had bumped against her prow, however, while her hand was on the
tiller, and--to complete the metaphor--had given the lighter vessel a
strain which still occasionally betrayed itself in a faint creaking. It
had been horrid to see him, because he represented the only serious harm
that (to her belief) she had ever done in the world: he was the only
person with an unsatisfied claim on her. She had made him unhappy, she
couldn't help it; and his unhappiness was a grim reality. She had cried
with rage, after he had left her, at--she hardly knew what: she tried to
think it had been at his want of consideration. He had come to her with
his unhappiness when her own bliss was so perfect; he had done his best
to darken the brightness of those pure rays. He had not been violent,
and yet there had been a violence in the impression. There had been a
violence at any rate in something somewhere; perhaps it was only in her
own fit of weeping and in that after-sense of the same which had lasted
three or four days.

The effect of his final appeal had in short faded away, and all the
first year of her marriage he had dropped out of her books. He was a
thankless subject of reference; it was disagreeable to have to think
of a person who was sore and sombre about you and whom you could yet do
nothing to relieve. It would have been different if she had been able to
doubt, even a little, of his unreconciled state, as she doubted of Lord