Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/522

514 514 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. He blushed again, more than before, and he looked at his watch. " Ah yes, 6.40 ; I haven't much time, but I have a fly at the door. Thank you very much." It was not apparent whether the thanks applied to her having reminded him of his train, or to the more sentimental remark. " Good-bye, Mrs. Osmond ; good-bye." He shook hands with her, without meeting her eye, and then he turned to Mrs. Touchett, who had wandered back to them. With her his parting was equally brief ; and in a moment the two ladies saw him move with long steps across the lawn. " Are you very sure he is to be married 3 " Isabel asked of her aunt. " I can't be surer than he ; but he seems sure. I congratulated him, and he accepted it." " Ah," said Isabel, " I give it up ! " while her aunt returned to the house and to those avocations which the visitor had interrupted. She gave it up, but she still thought of it thought of it while she strolled again under the great oaks whose shadows were long upon the acres of turf. At the end of a few minutes she found herself near a rustic bench, which, a moment after she had looked at it, struck her as an object recognised. It was not simply that she had seen it before, nor even that she had sat upon it; it was that in this spot something important had hap- pened to her- -that the place had an air of association. Then she remembered that she had been sitting there six years before, when a servant brought her from the house the letter in which Caspar Goodwood informed her that he had followed her to Europe ; and that when she had read that letter she looked up to hear Lord Warburton announcing that he should like to marry her. It was indeed an historical, an interesting, bench; she stood and looked at it as if it might have something to say to her. She would not sit down on it now she felt rather afraid of it. She only stood before it, and while she stood, -the past came back to her in one of those rushing waves of emotion by which people of sensibility are visited at odd hours. The effect of this agitation was a sudden sense of being very tired, under the influ- ence of which she overcame her scruples and sank into the rustic seat. I have said that she was restless and unable to occupy herself ; and whether or no, if you had seen her there, you would have admired the justice of the former epithet, you would at least have allowed that at this moment she was the