Page:The Portrait of a Lady (London, Macmillan & Co., 1881) Volume 2.djvu/134

 "You seem to me to be always envying some one. Yesterday it was the Pope; to-day it's poor Lord Warburton."

"My envy is not dangerous; it is very platonic. Why do you call him poor?"

"Women usually pity men after they have hurt them; that is their great way of showing kindness," said Ralph, joining in the conversation for the first time, with a cynicism so transparently ingenious as to be virtually innocent.

"Pray, have I hurt Lord Warburton?" Isabel asked, raising her eyebrows, as if the idea were perfectly novel.

"It serves him right if you have," said Henrietta, while the curtain rose for the ballet.

Isabel saw no more of her attributive victim for the next twenty-four hours, but on the second day after the visit to the opera she encountered him in the gallery of the Capitol, where he was standing before the lion of the collection, the statue of the Dying Gladiator. She had come in with her companions, among whom, on this occasion again, Gilbert Osmond was numbered, and the party, having ascended the staircase, entered the first and finest of the rooms. Lord Warburton spoke to her with all his usual geniality, but said in a moment that he was leaving the gallery.

"And I am leaving Rome," he added. "I should bid you good-bye."

I shall not undertake to explain why, but Isabel was sorry to hear it. It was, perhaps, because she had ceased to be afraid of his renewing his suit; she was thinking of something else. She was on the point of saying she was sorry, but she checked herself and simply wished him a happy journey.

He looked at her with a somewhat heavy eye.

"I am afraid you think me rather inconsistent," he said. "I