’I will so expect that all shall be taken for the best.  You know, I think, that I have liked you since I first saw you.’

‘I know that you have always been good to me.’

’I have liked you from the first.  That you are lovely perhaps is no merit, though, to speak the truth, I am well pleased that Silverbridge should have found so much beauty.’

‘That is all a matter of taste, I suppose,’ she said, laughing.

’But there is much a young woman may do for herself, which I think you have done.  A silly girl, though she be a second Helen, would hardly have satisfied me.’

‘Or perhaps him,’ said Isabel.

’Or him; and it is in that feeling that I find my chief satisfaction,—­that he should have the sense to have liked such a one as you better than others.  Now I have said it.  As not being one of us I did at first object to his choice.  As being what you are yourself, I am altogether reconciled to it.  Do not keep him long waiting.’

‘I do not think he likes being kept waiting for anything.’

‘I dare say not.  I dare say not.  And how there is one thing else.’  Then the Duke unlocked a little drawer that was close to his hand, and taking out a ring put it on her finger.  It was a bar of diamonds, perhaps a dozen or them, fixed in a little circlet of gold.  ‘This must never leave you,’ he said.

‘It never shall,—­having come from you.’

’It was the first present that I gave to my wife, and it is the first that I shall give to you.  You may imagine how sacred it is to me.  On no other hand could it be worn without something which to me would be akin to sacrilege.  Now I must not keep you longer or Silverbridge will be storming about the house.  He of course will tell me when it is to be; but do not you keep him long waiting.’  Then he kissed her and led her up into the drawing-room.  When he had spoken a word of greeting to Mrs Boncassen, he left them to their own devices.

After that they spent the best part of an hour in going over the house; but even that was done in a manner unsatisfactory to Silverbridge.  Wherever Isabel went, there Mrs Boncassen went also.  There might have been some fun in showing even the back kitchens to his bride-elect by herself;—­but there was one in wandering about those vast underground regions with a stout old lady who was really interested with the cooking apparatus and the washhouses.  The bedrooms one after another became tedious to him when Mrs Boncassen would make communications respecting each of them to her daughter.  ‘That is Gerald’s room,’ said Silverbridge.  ’You have never seen Gerald.  He is such a brick.’  Mrs Boncassen was charmed with the whips and sticks and boxing-gloves in Gerald’s room, and expressed an opinion that young men in the States mostly carried their knickknacks about with them to the Universities.  When she was told that he had another collection of ‘knickknacks’ at Matching, and another at Oxford, she thought that he was a very extravagant young man.  Isabel who had heard all about the gambling in Scotland, looked round her lover and smiled.