ansy's desecrated drapery; she fumbled for a pin and repaired the
injury; she smiled and listened to her account of her adventures. Her
attention, her sympathy were immediate and active; and they were
in direct proportion to a sentiment with which they were in no way
connected--a lively conjecture as to whether Lord Warburton might be
trying to make love to her. It was not simply his words just then; it
was others as well; it was the reference and the continuity. This was
what she thought about while she pinned up Pansy's dress. If it were
so, as she feared, he was of course unwitting; he himself had not taken
account of his intention. But this made it none the more auspicious,
made the situation none less impossible. The sooner he should get back
into right relations with things the better. He immediately began
to talk to Pansy--on whom it was certainly mystifying to see that he
dropped a smile of chastened devotion. Pansy replied, as usual, with a
little air of conscientious aspiration; he had to bend toward her a good
deal in conversation, and her eyes, as usual, wandered up and down his
robust person as if he had offered it to her for exhibition. She always
seemed a little frightened; yet her fright was not of the painful
character that suggests dislike; on the contrary, she looked as if she
knew that he knew she liked him. Isabel left them together a little and
wandered toward a friend whom she saw near and with whom she talked till
the music of the following dance began, for which she knew Pansy to be
also engaged. The girl joined her presently, with a little fluttered
flush, and Isabel, who scrupulously took Osmond's view of his daughter's
complete dependence, consigned her, as a precious and momentary loan,
to her appointed partner. About all this matter she had her own
imaginations, her own reserves; there were moments when Pansy's extreme
adhesiveness made each of them, to her sense, look foolish. But Osmond
had given her a sort of tableau of her position as his daughter's
duenna, which consisted of gracious alternations of concession and
contraction; and there were directions of his which she liked to think
she obeyed to the letter. Perhaps, as regards some of them, it was
because her doing so appeared to reduce them to the absurd.

After Pansy had been led away, she found Lord Warburton drawing near her
again. She rested her eyes on him steadily; she wished she could sound
his thoughts. But he had no appearan