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kind of undemonstrable pity for her; there seemed some-
thing so dreary in the condition of a person whose nature
had, as it were, so little surface—offered so limited a face to
the accretions of human contact. Nothing tender, nothing
sympathetic, had ever had a chance to fasten upon it—no
wind-sown blossom, no familiar softening moss. Her of-
fered, her passive extent, in other words, was about that of
a knife-edge. Isabel had reason to believe none the less that
as she advanced in life she made more of those concessions
to the sense of something obscurely distinct from conve-
nience—more of them than she independently exacted. She
was learning to sacrifice consistency to considerations of
that inferior order for which the excuse must be found in
the particular case. It was not to the credit of her absolute
rectitude that she should have gone the longest way round
to Florence in order to spend a few weeks with her invalid
son; since in former years it had been one of her most defi-
nite convictions that when Ralph wished to see her he was
at liberty to remember that Palazzo Crescentini contained a
large apartment known as the quarter of the signorino.
‘I want to ask you something,’ Isabel said to this young
man the day after her arrival at San Remo—‘something I’ve
thought more than once of asking you by letter, but that
I’ve hesitated on the whole to write about. Face to face, nev-
ertheless, my question seems easy enough. Did you know
your father intended to leave me so much money?’
Ralph stretched his legs a little further than usual and
gazed a little more fixedly at the Mediterranean. ‘What does
it matter, my dear Isabel, whether I knew? My father was

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