in some
wonder.

"I have never faced the possibility of failure in my life. And you are
as much to me as my career. I cannot imagine life without either."

He suddenly put his hand under her chin and lifted her face; she was of
tiny stature and this disadvantage in the presence of man was not the
least subtle of her charms. "Say yes quickly," he cried, and the
strength of his will and passion vibrated to her through the medium he
had established. But she pouted and drew back.

"Perhaps I want a career of my own. You would swallow me whole."

"You could become the most powerful woman in the Liberal party--have a
salon and all the rest of it."

"I happen to be a Conservative."

"What has that to do with it? Or politics with love, for that matter?
Tell me that you love me. That is all I care about."

"It is only during the engagement that love is all. Marriage is the
great public school of life; the passions fall meekly into their proper
place--beside the prosaic appetites, the objective demands; somewhat
below the faculties that distinguish the higher kingdom."

"Indeed? Well, I am sanguine enough to believe that we would prove the
exception. I hardly dare think of it!" he burst out. "For God's sake
keep your epigrams for other people and be a woman pure and simple."

She looked both as she permitted her full red mouth to tremble and his
arms to take sudden possession of her.

X

In the large liberty of an English country-house Isabel might have found
the long morning tedious had she been of a more sociable habit. Lady
Victoria, Mrs. Throfton, and Lady Cecilia Spence went to church; all
three, as great ladies, having a dutiful eye to the edification of
humbler folk. Flora Thangue spent the greater part of the morning
writing letters for her hostess, the men fled to the golf-links, and the
rest of the women not engaged in vehement political discussion, or
Bridge, were striding across country. Isabel, tempted by the charmingly
fitted writing-table in her room, although an indolent correspondent,
wrote a long and amply descriptive letter to her sister, which her
brother-in-law, being more than usually hard up at the moment of its
arrival, transposed into fiction and illustrated delightfully for a
local newspaper. Then she roamed about looking at the pictures, testing
her European education by discovering for herself the Lelys and Mores,
the Hoppners, Ketels, Holbeins, Knellers, Dahls, and Romneys. She h