about it, but I give you notice I shall talk to others."

"That's as you please. I only meant that it's rather better the
announcement should come from you than from me."

"I quite agree with you; it's much more proper!" And on this the aunt
and the niece went to breakfast, where Mrs. Touchett, as good as her
word, made no allusion to Gilbert Osmond. After an interval of silence,
however, she asked her companion from whom she had received a visit an
hour before.

"From an old friend--an American gentleman," Isabel said with a colour
in her cheek.

"An American gentleman of course. It's only an American gentleman who
calls at ten o'clock in the morning."

"It was half-past ten; he was in a great hurry; he goes away this
evening."

"Couldn't he have come yesterday, at the usual time?"

"He only arrived last night."

"He spends but twenty-four hours in Florence?" Mrs. Touchett cried.
"He's an American gentleman truly."

"He is indeed," said Isabel, thinking with perverse admiration of what
Caspar Goodwood had done for her.

Two days afterward Ralph arrived; but though Isabel was sure that Mrs.
Touchett had lost no time in imparting to him the great fact, he showed
at first no open knowledge of it. Their prompted talk was naturally of
his health; Isabel had many questions to ask about Corfu. She had been
shocked by his appearance when he came into the room; she had forgotten
how ill he looked. In spite of Corfu he looked very ill to-day, and she
wondered if he were really worse or if she were simply disaccustomed
to living with an invalid. Poor Ralph made no nearer approach to
conventional beauty as he advanced in life, and the now apparently
complete loss of his health had done little to mitigate the natural
oddity of his person. Blighted and battered, but still responsive and
still ironic, his face was like a lighted lantern patched with paper
and unsteadily held; his thin whisker languished upon a lean cheek; the
exorbitant curve of his nose defined itself more sharply. Lean he was
altogether, lean and long and loose-jointed; an accidental cohesion of
relaxed angles. His brown velvet jacket had become perennial; his
hands had fixed themselves in his pockets; he shambled and stumbled and
shuffled in a manner that denoted great physical helplessness. It was
perhaps this whimsical gait that helped to mark his character more than
ever as that of the humorous invalid--the invalid for whom even his own
disabilitie