Page:The Portrait of a Lady (London, Macmillan & Co., 1881) Volume 2.djvu/121

 last he raised them and said gravely—"I have written to you several times."

"Written to me? I have never got your letters."

"I never sent them. I burned them up."

"Ah," said Isabel with a laugh, "it was better that you should do that than I!"

"I thought you wouldn't care about them," he went on, with a simplicity that might have touched her. "It seemed to me that after all I had no right to trouble you with letters."

"I should have been very glad to have news of you. You know that I hoped that—that—" Isabel stopped; it seemed to her there would be a certain flatness in the utterance of her thought.

"I know what you are going to say. You hoped we should always remain good friends." This formula, as Lord Warburton uttered it, was certainly flat enough; but then he was interested in making it appear so.

Isabel found herself reduced simply to saying—"Please don't talk of all that;" a speech which hardly seemed to her an improvement on the other.

"It's a small consolation to allow me!" Lord Warburton exclaimed, with force.

"I can't pretend to console you," said the girl, who, as she sat there, found it good to think that she had given him the answer that had satisfied him so little six months before. He was pleasant, he was powerful, he was gallant, there was no better man than he. But her answer remained.

"It's very well you don't try to console me; it would not be in your power," she heard him say, through the medium of her quickened reflections.

"I hoped we should meet again, because I had no fear you