else?"

"That's a question I'd rather not answer."

"Ah, you do then!" her suitor murmured with bitterness.

The bitterness touched her, and she cried out: "You're mistaken! I
don't."

He sat down on a bench, unceremoniously, doggedly, like a man in
trouble; leaning his elbows on his knees and staring at the floor. "I
can't even be glad of that," he said at last, throwing himself back
against the wall; "for that would be an excuse."

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. "An excuse? Must I excuse myself?"

He paid, however, no answer to the question. Another idea had come into
his head. "Is it my political opinions? Do you think I go too far?"

"I can't object to your political opinions, because I don't understand
them."

"You don't care what I think!" he cried, getting up. "It's all the same
to you."

Isabel walked to the other side of the gallery and stood there showing
him her charming back, her light slim figure, the length of her white
neck as she bent her head, and the density of her dark braids. She
stopped in front of a small picture as if for the purpose of examining
it; and there was something so young and free in her movement that her
very pliancy seemed to mock at him. Her eyes, however, saw nothing; they
had suddenly been suffused with tears. In a moment he followed her, and
by this time she had brushed her tears away; but when she turned round
her face was pale and the expression of her eyes strange. "That reason
that I wouldn't tell you--I'll tell it you after all. It's that I can't
escape my fate."

"Your fate?"

"I should try to escape it if I were to marry you."

"I don't understand. Why should not that be your fate as well as
anything else?"

"Because it's not," said Isabel femininely. "I know it's not. It's not
my fate to give up--I know it can't be."

Poor Lord Warburton stared, an interrogative point in either eye. "Do
you call marrying me giving up?"

"Not in the usual sense. It's getting--getting--getting a great deal.
But it's giving up other chances."

"Other chances for what?"

"I don't mean chances to marry," said Isabel, her colour quickly coming
back to her. And then she stopped, looking down with a deep frown, as if
it were hopeless to attempt to make her meaning clear.

"I don't think it presumptuous in me to suggest that you'll gain more
than you'll lose," her companion observed.

"I can't escape unhappiness," said Isabel. "In marrying you I shall be
trying to."