He walked slowly to the end of the gallery, staring at its contents and saying nothing; and then suddenly he broke out: "I hoped you wouldn't write to me that way."
"It was the only way, Lord Warburton," said the girl. "Do try and believe that."
"If I could believe it of course I should let you alone, but we can't believe by willing it; and I confess I don't understand. I could understand your disliking me; that I could understand well. But that you should admit you do-"
"What have I admitted?" Isabel interrupted, turning slightly pale.
"That you think me a good fellow; isn't that it?" She said nothing, and he went on: "You don't seem to have any reason, and that gives me a sense of injustice."
"I have a reason, Lord Warburton." She said it in a tone that made his heart contract.
"I should like very much to know it."
"I'll tell you some day when there's more to show for it."
"Excuse my saying that in the meantime I must doubt of it."
"You make me very unhappy," said Isabel.
"I'm not sorry for that; it may help you to know how I feel. Will you kindly answer me a question?" Isabel made no audible assent, but he apparently saw in her eyes something that gave him courage to go on. " Do you prefer some one else?"
"That's a question I'd rather not answer."
"Ah, you do then!" her suitor murmured with bitterness.
The bitterness touched her, and she cried out: "You're mistaken! I don't."
He sat down on a bench, unceremoniously, doggedly, like a man in trouble; leaning his elbows on his knees and staring at the floor. "I can't even be glad of that," he said at last, throwing himself back against the wall; "for that would be an excuse."
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. "An excuse? Must I excuse myself?"
He paid, however, no answer to the question. Another idea had come into his head. "Is it my political opinions? Do you think I go too far?"
"I can't object to your political opinions, because I don't understand them."
"You don't care what I think!" he cried, getting up. "It's all the same to you."
Isabel walked to the other side of the gallery, and stood there showing him her charming back, her light slim figure, the length of her white neck as she bent her head, and the density of her dark braids. She stopped in front of a small picture as if for the purpose of examining it; and there was something so young and free in her movement that her very pliancy seemed to mock at him. Her eyes, however, saw nothing; they had suddenly been suffused with tears. In a moment he followed her, and by this time she had brushed her tears away; but when she turned around her face was pale and the expression of her eyes strange. "That reason that I wouldn't tell you-I'll tell you after all. It's that I can't escape my fate."
"Your fate?"
"I should try to escape it if I were to marry you."
"I don't understand. Why should not that be your fate as well as anything else?"
"Because it's not," said Isabel femininely. "I know it's not. It's not my fate to give up-I know it can't be."
Poor Lord Warburton stared, an interrogative point in either eye. "Do you call marrying me giving up?"
"Not in the usual sense. It's getting -getting- getting a great deal. But it's giving up other chances."
"Other chances for what?"
"I don't mean to marry," said Isabel, her colour quickly coming back to her. And then she stopped, looking down with a deep frown, as if it were hopeless to attempt to make her meaning clear.
"I don't think it presumptuous in me to suggest that you'll gain more than you'll lose," her companion observed.
"I can't escape unhappiness," said Isabel. "In marrying you I shall be trying to."
"I don't know whether you'd try to, but you certainly would: that I must in candour admit!" he exclaimed with an anxious laugh.
"I musn't-I can't!" cried the girl.
"Well, if you're bent on being miserable I don't see why you should make me so. Whatever charms a life of misery may have for you, it has none for me."
"I'm not bent on a life of misery," said Isabel. "I've always been intensely determined to be happy, and I've often believed I should be. I've told people that; you can ask them. But it comes over me every now and then that I can never be happy in any extraordinary way; not by turning away, by separating myself."
"By separating yourself from what?"
"From life. From the usual chances and dangers, from what most people know and suffer."
Lord Warburton broke into a smile that almost denoted hope. "Why, my dear Archer," he began to explain with the most considerate eagerness, "I don't offer you any exoneration from life or from any chances or dangers whatever. I wish I could, depend upon it I would! For what do you take me pray? Heaven help me, I'm not the Emperor of China! All I offer you is the chance of taking the common lot in a comfortable sort of way. The common lot? Why, I'm devoted to the common lot! Strike an alliance with me, and I promise you that you shall have plenty of it. You shall separate from nothing whatever-not even from your friend Miss Stackpole."
"She'd never approve of it," said Isabel, trying to smile and take advantage of this side-issue; despising herself too, not a little, for doing so.
...
After it, without rejoining Henrietta and Ralph, she retreated to her own room; in which apartment, before dinner, she was found by Mrs Touchett, who had stopped on her way to the saloon. "I may as well tell you," said that lady, "that your uncle has informed me of your relations with Lord Warburton."
Isabel considered. "Relations? They're hardly relations. That's the strange part of it: he has seen me but three or four times."
"Why did you tell your uncle rather than me?" Mrs Touchett dispassionately asked.
Again the girl hesitated. "Because he knows Lord Warburton better."
"Yes, but I know you better."
"I'm not sure of that," said Isabel, smiling.
"Neither am I, after all; especially when you give me that rather conceited look. One would think you were awfully pleased with yourself and had carried off a prize! I suppose that when you refuse an offer like Lord Warburton's it's because you expect to do something better."
"Ah, my uncle didn't say that!" cried Isabel, smiling still.
