After breakfast next morning, Ada was in the library, walking from window to window, watching the course of clouds which threatened rain, at a loss, it seemed, how to employ herself. She was surprised by Mrs. Clarendon’s entrance.
“You haven’t settled to work yet?” Isabel said, looking at her rather timidly.
Ada merely shook her head and came towards the table. Mrs. Clarendon took up a book and glanced at it.
“What are you busy with now?” she asked lightly.
“Nothing in particular. I’ve just finished a novel that interests me.”
“A novel? Frivolous young woman! Oh, I know that book. It’s very nice, all but the ending, and that I don’t believe in. That extravagant self-sacrifice is unnatural; no man ever yet made such a sacrifice.”
“It doesn’t seem to me impossible,” said Ada. “No? It will some day.”
Isabel’s way of speaking was not altogether like herself; it was rather too direct and abrupt.
“Oh, of a woman much more! We are not so self-sacrificing as they make us out, Ada.” She took a seat on a chair which stood edgewise to the table, and rested her head against her hand.
“Will you sit down?” she asked invitingly, when the girl still kept her position at a distance.
“You wish the distance to represent that which is always between us?” Isabel remarked, half sadly, half jestingly.
Ada seemed about to rise, but turned it off in an arrangement of her dress.
“When Mr. Asquith told you something from me a month ago,” Isabel continued, “did it occur to you that I had any motive in--in choosing just that time, in letting you know those things just when I did?”
Ada had fixed a keen and curious look on the speaker, a look which was troublesome in its intensity.
“I supposed,” was her measured reply, “that you thought I had come to the age when I ought to know something of the future that was before me.”
“Yes, that is true. You will credit me, will you not, with a desire to save you from being at a disadvantage?”
“You perhaps think I ought to have told you sooner?”
“On the other hand, you do not forget that nothing obliged me to tell you for another year and a half.”
Isabel suffered from the keen annoyance which this dry manner of the girl’s always occasioned her. She did not speak again till she felt able to do so with a voice as quiet as before.