Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII

She put the letter into her pocket and offered her visitor a
smile of welcome, exhibiting no trace of discomposure and half
surprised at her coolness.

"They told me you were out here," said Lord Warburton; "and as
there was no one in the drawing-room and it's really you that I
wish to see, I came out with no more ado."

Isabel had got up; she felt a wish, for the moment, that he
should not sit down beside her. "I was just going indoors."

"Please don't do that; it's much jollier here; I've ridden over
from Lockleigh; it's a lovely day." His smile was peculiarly
friendly and pleasing, and his whole person seemed to emit that
radiance of good-feeling and good fare which had formed the charm
of the girl's first impression of him. It surrounded him like a
zone of fine June weather.

"We'll walk about a little then," said Isabel, who could not
divest herself of the sense of an intention on the part of her
visitor and who wished both to elude the intention and to satisfy
her curiosity about it. It had flashed upon her vision once
before, and it had given her on that occasion, as we know, a
certain alarm. This alarm was composed of several elements, not
all of which were disagreeable; she had indeed spent some days in
analysing them and had succeeded in separating the pleasant part
of the idea of Lord Warburton's "making up" to her from the
painful. It may appear to some readers that the young lady was
both precipitate and unduly fastidious; but the latter of these
facts, if the charge be true, may serve to exonerate her from the
discredit of the former. She was not eager to convince herself
that a territorial magnate, as she had heard Lord Warburton
called, was smitten with her charms; the fact of a declaration
from such a source carrying with it really more questions than it
would answer. She had received a strong impression of his being a
"personage," and she had occupied herself in examining the image
so conveyed. At the risk of adding to the evidence of her
self-sufficiency it must be said that there had been moments
when this possibility of admiration by a personage represented to
her an aggression almost to the degree of an affront, quite to
the degree of an inconvenience. She had never yet known a
personage; there had been no personages, in this sense, in her
life; there were probably none such at all in her native land.
When she had thought of individual eminence she had thought of it
on the basis of character and wit--of what one might like in a
gentleman's mind and in his talk. She herself was a character
--she couldn't help being aware of that; and hitherto her visions
of a completed consciousness had concerned themselves largely
with moral