ace, out of which more eyes might have seemed to
look at her than she had ever had to meet.

She had spoken no name, yet Isabel could but check, on her own lips, an
echo of the unspoken. She sank to her seat again, hanging her head.
"Why have you told me this?" she asked in a voice the Countess hardly
recognised.

"Because I've been so bored with your not knowing. I've been bored,
frankly, my dear, with not having told you; as if, stupidly, all this
time I couldn't have managed! Ca me depasse, if you don't mind my saying
so, the things, all round you, that you've appeared to succeed in not
knowing. It's a sort of assistance--aid to innocent ignorance--that
I've always been a bad hand at rendering; and in this connexion, that
of keeping quiet for my brother, my virtue has at any rate finally
found itself exhausted. It's not a black lie, moreover, you know," the
Countess inimitably added. "The facts are exactly what I tell you."

"I had no idea," said Isabel presently; and looked up at her in a manner
that doubtless matched the apparent witlessness of this confession.

"So I believed--though it was hard to believe. Had it never occurred to
you that he was for six or seven years her lover?"

"I don't know. Things HAVE occurred to me, and perhaps that was what
they all meant."

"She has been wonderfully clever, she has been magnificent, about
Pansy!" the Countess, before all this view of it, cried.

"Oh, no idea, for me," Isabel went on, "ever DEFINITELY took that form."
She appeared to be making out to herself what had been and what hadn't.
"And as it is--I don't understand."

She spoke as one troubled and puzzled, yet the poor Countess seemed to
have seen her revelation fall below its possibilities of effect. She
had expected to kindle some responsive blaze, but had barely extracted a
spark. Isabel showed as scarce more impressed than she might have
been, as a young woman of approved imagination, with some fine sinister
passage of public history. "Don't you recognise how the child could
never pass for HER husband's?--that is with M. Merle himself," her
companion resumed. "They had been separated too long for that, and he
had gone to some far country--I think to South America. If she had ever
had children--which I'm not sure of--she had lost them. The conditions
happened to make it workable, under stress (I mean at so awkward a
pinch), that Osmond should acknowledge the little girl. His wife was
dead--very true; b