there was that in her expression and attitude which would have
suggested that she was expecting a visitor. The tall window was open,
and though its green shutters were partly drawn the bright air of the
garden had come in through a broad interstice and filled the room with
warmth and perfume. Our young woman stood near it for some time, her
hands clasped behind her; she gazed abroad with the vagueness of unrest.
Too troubled for attention she moved in a vain circle. Yet it could not
be in her thought to catch a glimpse of her visitor before he should
pass into the house, since the entrance to the palace was not through
the garden, in which stillness and privacy always reigned. She wished
rather to forestall his arrival by a process of conjecture, and to judge
by the expression of her face this attempt gave her plenty to do. Grave
she found herself, and positively more weighted, as by the experience of
the lapse of the year she had spent in seeing the world. She had ranged,
she would have said, through space and surveyed much of mankind, and
was therefore now, in her own eyes, a very different person from the
frivolous young woman from Albany who had begun to take the measure
of Europe on the lawn at Gardencourt a couple of years before. She
flattered herself she had harvested wisdom and learned a great deal
more of life than this light-minded creature had even suspected. If
her thoughts just now had inclined themselves to retrospect, instead
of fluttering their wings nervously about the present, they would have
evoked a multitude of interesting pictures. These pictures would have
been both landscapes and figure-pieces; the latter, however, would have
been the more numerous. With several of the images that might have been
projected on such a field we are already acquainted. There would be for
instance the conciliatory Lily, our heroine's sister and Edmund Ludlow's
wife, who had come out from New York to spend five months with her
relative. She had left her husband behind her, but had brought
her children, to whom Isabel now played with equal munificence and
tenderness the part of maiden-aunt. Mr. Ludlow, toward the last, had
been able to snatch a few weeks from his forensic triumphs and, crossing
the ocean with extreme rapidity, had spent a month with the two ladies
in Paris before taking his wife home. The little Ludlows had not yet,
even from the American point of view, reached the proper tourist-age; so
that while her