."
"Never?" said Lord Warburton.
"I won't say 'never'; I should feel very melodramatic."
"May I come and see you then some day next week?"
"Most assuredly. What is there to prevent it?"
"Nothing tangible. But with you I never feel safe. I've a sort of sense that you're always summing people up."
"You don't of necessity lose by that."
"It's very kind of you to say so; but, even if I gain, stern justice is not what I most love. Is Mrs. Touchett going to take you abroad?"
"I hope so."
"Is England not good enough for you?"
"That's a very Machiavellian speech; it doesn't deserve an answer. I want to see as many countries as I can."
"Then you'll go on judging, I suppose."
"Enjoying, I hope, too."
"Yes, that's what you enjoy most; I can't make out what you're up to," said Lord Warburton. "You strike me as having mysterious purposes—vast designs."
"You're so good as to have a theory about me which I don't at all fill out. Is there anything mysterious in a purpose entertained and executed every year, in the most public manner, by fifty thousand of my fellow-countrymen—the purpose of improving one's mind by foreign travel?"
"You can't improve your mind, Miss Archer," her companion declared. "It's already a most formidable instrument. It looks down on us all; it despises us."
"Despises you? You're making fun of me," said Isabel seriously.
"Well, you think us 'quaint'—that's the same thing. I won't be thought 'quaint,' to begin with; I'm not so in the least. I protest."
"That protest is one of the quaintest things I've ever heard," Isabel answered with a smile.
Lord Warburton was briefly silent. "You judge only from the outside—you don't care," he said presently. "You only care to amuse yourself." The note she had heard in his voice a moment before reappeared, and mixed with it now was an audible strain of bitterness—a bitterness so abrupt and inconsequent that the girl was afraid she had hurt him. She had often heard that the
