she believed you would be good to Pansy."

"Poor woman--and Pansy who doesn't like her!" cried Isabel.

"That's the reason she wanted some one whom Pansy would like. She knows
it; she knows everything."

"Will she know that you've told me this?"

"That will depend upon whether you tell her. She's prepared for it, and
do you know what she counts upon for her defence? On your believing that
I lie. Perhaps you do; don't make yourself uncomfortable to hide it.
Only, as it happens this time, I don't. I've told plenty of little
idiotic fibs, but they've never hurt any one but myself."

Isabel sat staring at her companion's story as at a bale of fantastic
wares some strolling gypsy might have unpacked on the carpet at her
feet. "Why did Osmond never marry her?" she finally asked.

"Because she had no money." The Countess had an answer for everything,
and if she lied she lied well. "No one knows, no one has ever known,
what she lives on, or how she has got all those beautiful things. I
don't believe Osmond himself knows. Besides, she wouldn't have married
him."

"How can she have loved him then?"

"She doesn't love him in that way. She did at first, and then, I
suppose, she would have married him; but at that time her husband was
living. By the time M. Merle had rejoined--I won't say his ancestors,
because he never had any--her relations with Osmond had changed, and she
had grown more ambitious. Besides, she has never had, about him,"
the Countess went on, leaving Isabel to wince for it so tragically
afterwards--"she HAD never had, what you might call any illusions of
INTELLIGENCE. She hoped she might marry a great man; that has always
been her idea. She has waited and watched and plotted and prayed; but
she has never succeeded. I don't call Madame Merle a success, you know.
I don't know what she may accomplish yet, but at present she has very
little to show. The only tangible result she has ever achieved--except,
of course, getting to know every one and staying with them free of
expense--has been her bringing you and Osmond together. Oh, she did
that, my dear; you needn't look as if you doubted it. I've watched
them for years; I know everything--everything. I'm thought a great
scatterbrain, but I've had enough application of mind to follow up those
two. She hates me, and her way of showing it is to pretend to be for
ever defending me. When people say I've had fifteen lovers she looks
horrified and declares that quit