Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/287

279 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. 279 XXXI. ISABEL came back to Florence, but only after several months; an interval sufficiently replete with incident. It is not, however, during this interval that we are closely concerned with her ; our attention is engaged again on a certain day in the late spring- time, shortly after her return to the Palazzo Crescentini, and a year from the date of the incidents I have just narrated. She was alone on this occasion, in one of the smaller of the numerous rooms devoted by Mrs. Touchett to social uses, and there was that in her expression and attitude which would have suggested that she was expecting a visitor. The tall window was open, and though its green shutters were partly drawn, the bright air of the garden had come in through a broad interstice and filled the room with warmth and perfume. Our young lady stood for some time at the window, with her hands clasped behind her, gazing into the brilliant aperture in the manner of a person relapsing into reverie. She was pre-occupied ; she was too rest- less to sit down, to work, to read. It was evidently not her design, however, to catch a glimpse of her visitor before* he should pass into the house ; for the entrance to the palace was not through the garden, in which stillness and privacy always reigned. She was endeavouring rather to anticipate his arrival by a process of conjecture, and to judge by the expression of her face this attempt gave her plenty to do. She was extremely grave ; not sad exactly, but deeply serious. The lapse of a year may doubtless account for a considerable increase of gravity ; though this will depend a good deal upon the manner in which the year has been spent. Isabel had spent hers in seeing the world ; she had moved about ; she had travelled ; she had exerted herself with an almost passionate activity. She was now, to her own sense, a very 'different person from tiae frivolous young woman from Albany who had begun to see Europe upon the lawn at Gardencourt a couple of years before. She flattered herself that she had gathered a rich experience, that she knew a great deal more of life than this light-minded creature had even suspected. If her thoughts just now had inclined them- selves to retrospect, instead of fluttering their wings nervously about the present, they would have evoked a multitude of inter- esting pictures. These pictures would have been both landscapes and figure-pieces ; the latter, however, would have been the more numerous. With several of the figures concerned in these