d, that's one thing, and it's
a pity. If he gave her up to please you it's another. That's a pity too,
but in a different way. Then, in the latter case, you'd perhaps resign
yourself to not being pleased--to simply seeing your step-daughter
married. Let him off--let us have him!"

Madame Merle had proceeded very deliberately, watching her companion and
apparently thinking she could proceed safely. As she went on Isabel grew
pale; she clasped her hands more tightly in her lap. It was not that her
visitor had at last thought it the right time to be insolent; for this
was not what was most apparent. It was a worse horror than that. "Who
are you--what are you?" Isabel murmured. "What have you to do with my
husband?" It was strange that for the moment she drew as near to him as
if she had loved him.

"Ah then, you take it heroically! I'm very sorry. Don't think, however,
that I shall do so."

"What have you to do with me?" Isabel went on.

Madame Merle slowly got up, stroking her muff, but not removing her eyes
from Isabel's face. "Everything!" she answered.

Isabel sat there looking up at her, without rising; her face was almost
a prayer to be enlightened. But the light of this woman's eyes seemed
only a darkness. "Oh misery!" she murmured at last; and she fell
back, covering her face with her hands. It had come over her like a
high-surging wave that Mrs. Touchett was right. Madame Merle had married
her. Before she uncovered her face again that lady had left the room.

Isabel took a drive alone that afternoon; she wished to be far away,
under the sky, where she could descend from her carriage and tread
upon the daisies. She had long before this taken old Rome into her
confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a
less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that
had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her
secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern
quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a
sun-warmed angle on a winter's day, or stood in a mouldy church to which
no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness.
Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the
continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the
greater. She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it
interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think