38 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. said to himself ; but he said it without irritation ; her eagerness amused 'and even pleased him. The lamps were on brackets, at intervals, and if the light was imperfect it was genial. It fell upon the vague squares of rich colour and on the faded gilding of heavy frames ; it made a shining on the polished floor of the gallery. Ralph /took a candlestick and moved about, pointing out the things he liked ; Isabel, bending toward one picture after another, indulged in little exclamations and murmurs. She was evidently a judge ; she had a natural taste ; he was struck with that. She took a candlestick herself and held it slowly here and there ; she lifted it high, and as she did so, he found himself pausing in the middle of the gallery and bending his eyes much less upon the pictures than on her figure. He lost nothing, in truth, by these wandering glances ; for she was better worth looking at than most works of art. She was thin, and light, and middling tall; when people had wished to distin- guish her from the other two Miss Archers, they always called her the thin one. Her hair, which was dark even to blackness, had been an object of envy to many women ; her light grey eye, a little too keen perhaps in her graver moments, had an enchant- ing softness when she smiled. They walked slowly up one side of the gallery and down the other, and then she said " Well, now I know more than I did when I began ! " "You apparently have a great passion for knowledge," her cousin answered, laughing. " I think I have ; most girls seem to me so ignorant," said Isabel. " You strike me as different from most girls." " Ah, some girls are so nice," murmured Isabel, who preferred not to talk about heiself. Then, in a moment, to change the subject, she went on, " Please tell me isn't there a ghost 'I " "A ghost!" " A spectre, a phantom ; we call them ghosts in America." " So we do here, when we see them." " You do see them, then 1 You ought to, in this romantic old house." " It's not a romantic house," said Ralph. " You will be disappointed if you count on that. It's dismally prosaic ; there is no romance here but what you may have brought with you." " I have brought a great deal ; but it seems to me I have brought it to the right place." " To keep it out of harm, certainly ; nothing will ever happen to it here, between my father and me." Isabel looked at him a moment.
