ut she had not been dead too long to put a certain
accommodation of dates out of the question--from the moment, I mean,
that suspicion wasn't started; which was what they had to take care of.
What was more natural than that poor Mrs. Osmond, at a distance and
for a world not troubling about trifles, should have left behind her,
poverina, the pledge of her brief happiness that had cost her her life?
With the aid of a change of residence--Osmond had been living with her
at Naples at the time of their stay in the Alps, and he in due course
left it for ever--the whole history was successfully set going. My poor
sister-in-law, in her grave, couldn't help herself, and the real mother,
to save HER skin, renounced all visible property in the child."

"Ah, poor, poor woman!" cried Isabel, who herewith burst into tears. It
was a long time since she had shed any; she had suffered a high reaction
from weeping. But now they flowed with an abundance in which the
Countess Gemini found only another discomfiture.

"It's very kind of you to pity her!" she discordantly laughed. "Yes
indeed, you have a way of your own--!"

"He must have been false to his wife--and so very soon!" said Isabel
with a sudden check.

"That's all that's wanting--that you should take up her cause!" the
Countess went on. "I quite agree with you, however, that it was much too
soon."

"But to me, to me--?" And Isabel hesitated as if she had not heard; as
if her question--though it was sufficiently there in her eyes--were all
for herself.

"To you he has been faithful? Well, it depends, my dear, on what you
call faithful. When he married you he was no longer the lover of another
woman--SUCH a lover as he had been, cara mia, between their risks and
their precautions, while the thing lasted! That state of affairs had
passed away; the lady had repented, or at all events, for reasons of her
own, drawn back: she had always had, too, a worship of appearances
so intense that even Osmond himself had got bored with it. You may
therefore imagine what it was--when he couldn't patch it on conveniently
to ANY of those he goes in for! But the whole past was between them."

"Yes," Isabel mechanically echoed, "the whole past is between them."

"Ah, this later past is nothing. But for six or seven years, as I say,
they had kept it up."

She was silent a little. "Why then did she want him to marry me?"

"Ah my dear, that's her superiority! Because you had money; and because