390 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. " No, I don't. I think Pansy would do wonderfully well to marry you, and I don't know who should know it better than you. But you are not in love." " ^h, yes I am, Mrs. Osmond ! " Isabel shook her head. " You like to think you are, while you sit here with me. Eut that's not how you strike me." " I'm not like the young man in the doorway. I admit that. But what makes it so unnatural ? Could anything in the world be more charming than Miss Osmond 1 " " Nothing, possibly. But love has nothing to do with good reasons." "I don't agree with you. I am delighted to have good reasons." " Of course you are. If you were really in love you wouldn't care a straw for them." " Ah, really in love really in love ! " Lord Warburton ex- claimed, folding his arms, leaning back his head, and stretching himself a little. " You must remember that I am forty years old. I won't pretend that I am as I once was." " Well, if you are sure," said Isabel, " it's all right." He answered nothing; he sat there, with his head back, looking before him. Abruptly, however, he changed his position ; he turned quickly to his companion. " Why, are you so unwilling, so sceptical?" She met his eye, and for a moment they looked straight at each other. If she wished to be satisfied, she saw something that satisfied her; she saw in his eye the gleam of an idea that she was uneasy on her own account that she was perhaps even frightened. It expressed a suspicion, not a hope, but such as it was it told her what she wished to know. Not for an instant should he suspect that she detected in his wish to marry her step-daughter an implication of increased nearness to herself, or that if she did detect it she thought it alarming or compromising. In that brief, extremely personal gaze, however, deeper meanings passed between them than they were conscious of at the moment. " My dear Lord Warburton," she said, smiling, " you may do, |S far as I am concerned, whatever chines into your head." And with this she got up, and wandered into the adjoining room, where she encountered several acquaintances. While she talked with them she found herself regretting that she had moved ; it looked a little like running away all the more as Lord Warburton didn't follow her. She was glad of this, how- ever, and, at any rate, she was satisfied. She was so well satisfied til at when, in passing back into the ball-room, she found Edward
