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mote corner of the Forum, and he presently remarked that
if it should please the signori to go and watch it a little they
might see something of interest. The proposal commended
itself more to Ralph than to Isabel, weary with much wan-
dering; so that she admonished her companion to satisfy
his curiosity while she patiently awaited his return. The
hour and the place were much to her taste—she should en-
joy being briefly alone. Ralph accordingly went off with the
cicerone while Isabel sat down on a prostrate column near
the foundations of the Capitol. She wanted a short solitude,
but she was not long to enjoy it. Keen as was her interest in
the rugged relics of the Roman past that lay scattered about
her and in which the corrosion of centuries had still left so
much of individual life, her thoughts, after resting a while
on these things, had wandered, by a concatenation of stag-
es it might require some subtlety to trace, to regions and
objects charged with a more active appeal. From the Ro-
man past to Isabel Archer’s future was a long stride, but her
imagination had taken it in a single flight and now hovered
in slow circles over the nearer and richer field. She was so
absorbed in her thoughts, as she bent her eyes upon a row
of cracked but not dislocated slabs covering the ground at
her feet, that she had not heard the sound of approaching
footsteps before a shadow was thrown across the line of her
vision. She looked up and saw a gentleman—a gentleman
who was not Ralph come back to say that the excavations
were a bore. This personage was startled as she was startled;
he stood there baring his head to her perceptibly pale sur-
prise.

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