only tell you because I think it can't offend you, and some day
or other it may give you pleasure. It gives me pleasure, I assure
you," he went on, standing there before her, considerately
inclined to her, turning his hat, which he had taken up, slowly
round with a movement which had all the decent tremor of
awkwardness and none of its oddity, and presenting to her his
firm, refined, slightly ravaged face. "It gives me no pain,
because it's perfectly simple. For me you'll always be the most
important woman in the world."

Isabel looked at herself in this character--looked intently,
thinking she filled it with a certain grace. But what she said
was not an expression of any such complacency. "You don't offend
me; but you ought to remember that, without being offended, one
may be incommoded, troubled." "Incommoded," she heard herself
saying that, and it struck her as a ridiculous word. But it was
what stupidly came to her.

"I remember perfectly. Of course you're surprised and startled.
But if it's nothing but that, it will pass away. And it will
perhaps leave something that I may not be ashamed of."

"I don't know what it may leave. You see at all events that I'm
not overwhelmed," said Isabel with rather a pale smile. "I'm not
too troubled to think. And I think that I'm glad I leave Rome
to-morrow."

"Of course I don't agree with you there."

"I don't at all KNOW you," she added abruptly; and then she