IV
HE was a man rather difficult to tie; and he had just escaped from a determined effort to entangle him, on the part of Isabel Perry. Isabel's choice seemed to lie between him and a convent. For some time past she had been studying the Catholic doctrine. A strong impulse of her passionate nature forced her toward that faith; but as yet she had only a desire to be convinced, not a conviction. In his last interview with her, at her country-house, Basil had found her much moved by a long visit that morning from a Catholic priest, in whom she thought she had found a sort of Pascal. The master of the house was away, for Isabel's advances to the faith were much more surreptitious than her love affairs. Basil was to lunch with her. He found her in tears, torn between the effect of the priest's talk and a violent revulsion.
"Let us go out," she had said at once on seeing him, and she had led the way out of the library that opened on a broad stretch of turf, into the wood. Walking there, she told him, in a depressed, nervous tone, of her difficulties.
If I could only be sure," she said, clasping
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