Isabel’s letters were the perfection of self-expression.  Her handwriting swept across the page just as she would walk down a street, at once eager and yet stately and subtle-rhythmed; the shape of some of the words reminded you of her hats,—­hats everyone thought she paid guineas for, but which she made for herself at a cost perhaps of five shillings:  hats which were Paris with a touch of fairyland, somewhere an unobtrusive feather of the fantastic, somewhere a personal magic in the inimitable twist or lie of a bow—­; her face looked out at you from a g or an x, a gesture flashed back to you in a sudden distinguished stroke of the pen, and her voice was somewhere, everywhere, among the words, like a violin.

Without any apparent literary device she contrived to make you, while you read her letters, do what she was doing, see what she was seeing, and form, as though acted on by some magic property in the words, pictures of all she told you.

One piece of news you would not expect her to have told.  I have said that women are both executioners of the tiresome.  In this Isabel, I fear, was no exception to her sex.  Like most independent girls in London, she had a little theatre-guard of devoted men friends, who took it in turn to companion her to plays or picture-galleries; and these, with admirable tact, she contrived to keep in, to them, the unsatisfactory relation of brothers.  One of these, however, had of late been growing dangerously unfraternal.  His presents had been growing expensive.  Cigarettes and chocolates, and pretty editions, like gloves, and boxes of flowers, are every pretty woman’s lawful spoils; but costlier gifts are to be looked on with suspicion.  Besides, the doomed man’s letters had been growing warmer.  Indeed, Isabel remembered with something like a shudder, so soon as she was back in her little room, with its curious pictures and its general sense of exotic refinement, that she had allowed him to kiss her the last time they had been together.  The reminiscence decided her.  Theophil could never be hers; but at least no facile or mediocre attachments should fill his place.  So at once there is posted a letter, as kind as cruelty can make it, and with it go a little ormolu clock, a pair of mother-of-pearl opera-glasses, a lovely fan it was hard, Isabel, to part with,—­and there is an end of that.

“Not after Theophil!” she sighed, as she took up her great Persian cat, and, like it, sat gazing into the fire that flickered dreamily among her fantastic possessions,—­a mystery gazing idly into a mystery.

CHAPTER XVII

“O THAT ’T WERE POSSIBLE ...”

Well, the months have at last gone by,—­dark solid bodies of absence, not a day mercifully lost count of by the old calendar-maker, not an hour of the long sentence remitted for a brave patience in the waiting.  They are reckoning by weeks at last, and now, excitedly, by days, breathlessly now by little fast-dispersing hours.