Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/344

336 THE PORTKAIT OF A LADY. strength. An hour ago, when I bade him good-night, he told me that he was very tired, but very happy. Go to him in the morning ; that's all I mean. I didn't tell him I was coming here ; I didn't think of it till after we separated. Then I remembered that he had told me that you had an evening, and that it was this very Thursday. It occurred to me to come in and tell you that he was here, and let you know that you had perhaps better not wait for him to call. I think he said he had not written to you." There was no need of Isabel's declaring that she would act upon Lord Warburton's information ; she looked, as she sat there, like a winged creature held back. " Let alone that I wanted to see you for myself," her visitor added, gallantly. " I don't understand Ralph's plan ; it seems to me very wild," she said. " I was glad to think of him between those thick walls at Gardencourt." " He was completely alone there ; the thick walls were his only company." " You went to see him ; you have been extremely kind." " Oh dear, I had nothing to do," said Lord Warburton. " We hear, on the contrary, that you are doing great things. Every one speaks of you as a great statesman, and I am per- petually seeing your name in the Times, which, by the way, doesn't appear to hold it in reverence. You are apparently as bo!4 a radical as ever." " I don't feel nearly so bold ; you know the world has come round to me. Touchett and I have kept up a sort of Parliament- ary debate, all the way from London. I tell him he is the last of the Tories, and he calls me the head of the Communists. So you see there is life in him yet." Isabel had many questions to ask about Ralph, but she abstained from asking them alL She would see for herself on the morrow. She perceived that after a little Lord Warburton would tire of that subject that he had a consciousness of other possible topics. She was more and more able to say to herself that he had recovered, and, what is more to the point, she was able to say- it without bitterness. He had been for her, of old, such an image of urgency, of insistence, of something to be resisted and reasoned with, that his reappearance at first menaced her with a new trouble. But she was ncjw reassured ; she could see that he only wished to live with heron good terms, that she was to understand that he had forgiven her and was incapable of the bad taste of making pointed allusions. This was not a form of revenge, of course ; she had no suspicion that