difference of view--Ralph having amused himself with taking the
ground that the genial ex-guardsman was a regular Machiavelli.
Caspar Goodwood could contribute nothing to such a debate; but
after he had been left alone with his host he found there were
various other matters they could take up. It must be admitted
that the lady who had just gone out was not one of these; Caspar
granted all Miss Stackpole's merits in advance, but had no
further remark to make about her. Neither, after the first
allusions, did the two men expatiate upon Mrs. Osmond--a theme in
which Goodwood perceived as many dangers as Ralph. He felt very
sorry for that unclassable personage; he couldn't bear to see a
pleasant man, so pleasant for all his queerness, so beyond
anything to be done. There was always something to be done, for
Goodwood, and he did it in this case by repeating several times
his visit to the Hotel de Paris. It seemed to Isabel that she had
been very clever; she had artfully disposed of the superfluous
Caspar. She had given him an occupation; she had converted him
into a caretaker of Ralph. She had a plan of making him travel
northward with her cousin as soon as the first mild weather
should allow it. Lord Warburton had brought Ralph to Rome and Mr.
Goodwood should take him away. There seemed a happy symmetry in
this, and she was now intensely eager that Ralph should depart.
She had a constant fear he would die there before her eyes and a
horror of the occurrence of this event at an inn, by her door,
which he had so rarely entered. Ralph must sink to his last rest
in his own dear house, in one of those deep, dim chambers of
Gardencourt where the dark ivy would cluster round the edges of
the glimmering window. There seemed to Isabel in these days
something sacred in Gardencourt; no chapter of the past was more
perfectly irrecoverable. When she thought of the months she had