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308 SOS THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. than most people. I suppose it is their business to suspect that of your own family ; it's proper on the whole they should. They will like me better some day ; so will you, for that matter. Meanwhile my business is not to bother, but simply to be thank- ful for life and love. It has made me better, loving you," he said on another occasion; "it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I didn't have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied, as I once told you. I nattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation ; I used to have morbid, sterile, hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I am really satisfied, because I can't think of anything better. It is just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains ; but now that I can read it properly I see that it's a delightful story. My dear girl, I can't tell you how life seems to stretch there before us what a long summer afternoon awaits us. It's the latter half of an Italian day with a golden haze, and the shadows just lengthening, and that divine delicacy in the light, the air, the landscape, which I have loved all my life, and which you love to-day. Upon my word, I don't see why we shouldn't get on. We have got what we like to say nothing of having each other. We have the faculty of admir- ation, and several excellent beliefs. We are not stupid, we are not heavy, we are not under bonds to any dull limitations. You are very fresh, and I am well-seasoned. We have got my poor child to amuse us ; we will try and make up some little life for her. It is all soft and mellow it has the Italian colouring." They made a good many plans, but they left themselves also a good deal of latitude ; it was a matter of course, however, that they should live for the present in Italy. It w r as in Italy that they had met, Italy had been a party to their first impressions of each other, and Italy should be a party to their happiness. Osmond had the attachment of old acquaintance, and Isabel the stimulus of new, which seemed to assure her a future of beautiful hours. The desire for unlimited expansion had been succeeded in her mind by the sense that life was vacant without some private duty which gathered one's energies to a point. She told Ralph that she had "seen life " in a year or two, and that she was already tired, not of life, but of observation. y What had become of all her ardours, her aspirations, her theories, her high estimate of her independence, and her incipient conviction that she should never marry 1 These things had been absorbed in a