 door were discovered to be unlocked nobody
could know how the unlocking came about. The inconvenient Isabel, like other
offenders, did not foresee her own impulse to confession, a fatality which came
upon her the morning after the party, when Gwendolen said at the
breakfast-table, »I know the door was looked before the housekeeper gave me the
key, for I tried it myself afterwards. Some one must have been to my drawer and
taken the key.«
    It seemed to Isabel that Gwendolen's awful eyes had rested on her more than
on the other sisters, and without any time for resolve she said with a trembling
lip, »Please forgive me, Gwendolen.«
    The forgiveness was sooner bestowed than it would have been if Gwendolen had
not desired to dismiss from her own and every one else's memory any case in
which she had shown her susceptibility to terror. She wondered at herself in
these occasional experiences, which seemed like a brief remembered madness, an
unexplained exception from her normal life; and in this instance she felt a
peculiar vexation that her helpless fear had shown itself, not, as usual, in
solitude, but in well-lit company. Her ideal was to be daring in speech and
reckless in braving dangers, both moral and physical; and though her practice
fell far behind her ideal, this shortcoming seemed to be due to the pettiness of
circumstances, the narrow theatre which life offers to a girl of twenty, who
cannot conceive herself as anything else than a lady, or as in any position
which would lack the tribute of respect. She had no permanent consciousness of
other fetters, or of more spiritual restraints, having always disliked whatever
was presented to her under the name of religion, in the same way that some
people dislike arithmetic and accounts: it had raised no other emotion in her,
no alarm, no longing; so that the question whether she believed it had not
occurred to her, any more than it had occurred to her to inquire into the
conditions of colonial property and banking, on which, as she had had many
opportunities of knowing, the family fortune was dependent. All these facts
about herself she would have been ready to admit, and even, more or less
indirectly, to state. What she unwillingly recognised, and would have been glad
for others to be unaware of, was that liability of hers to fits of spiritual
dread, though this fountain of awe within her had not found its way into
connection with the religion taught her or with any human relations. She was
ashamed and frightened, as at what might happen again
