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custom of going to vespers at Saint Peter’s; and it had been
agreed among our friends that they would drive together to
the great church. After lunch, an hour before the carriage
came, Lord Warburton presented himself at the Hotel de
Paris and paid a visit to the two ladies, Ralph Touchett and
Mr. Bantling having gone out together. The visitor seemed
to have wished to give Isabel a proof of his intention to keep
the promise made her the evening before; he was both dis-
creet and frank—not even dumbly importunate or remotely
intense. He thus left her to judge what a mere good friend
he could be. He talked about his travels, about Persia, about
Turkey, and when Miss Stackpole asked him whether it
would ‘pay’ for her to visit those countries assured her they
offered a great field to female enterprise. Isabel did him jus-
tice, but she wondered what his purpose was and what he
expected to gain even by proving the superior strain of his
sincerity. If he expected to melt her by showing what a good
fellow he was, he might spare himself the trouble. She knew
the superior strain of everything about him, and nothing
he could now do was required to light the view. Moreover
his being in Rome at all affected her as a complication of the
wrong sort—she liked so complications of the right. Never-
theless, when, on bringing his call to a close, he said he too
should be at Saint Peter’s and should look out for her and
her friends, she was obliged to reply that he must follow his
convenience.
In the church, as she strolled over its tesselated acres,
he was the first person she encountered. She had not been
one of the superior tourists who are ‘disappointed’ in Saint

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