"So I believed-though it was hard to believe. Had it never
occurred to you that he was for six or seven years her lover?"
"I don't know. Things have occurred to me, and perhaps that was what
they all meant."
"She has been wonderfully clever, she has been magnificent, about
Pansy!" the Countess, before all this view of it, cried.
"Oh, no idea, for me," Isabel went on, "ever definitely took that
form." She appeared to be making out to herself what had been and what
hadn't. "And as it is-I don't understand."
She spoke as one troubled and puzzled, yet the poor Countess
seemed to have seen her revelation fall below its possibilities of
effect. She had expected to kindle some responsive blaze, but had
barely extracted a spark.
Isabel showed as scarce more impressed than she might have been,
as a young woman of approved imagination, with some fine sinister
passage of public history. "Don't you recognize how the child could
never pass for her husband's?-that is with M. Merle himself," her
companion resumed. "They had been separated too long for that, and
he had gone to some far country-I think to South America. If she had
ever had children-which I'm not sure of-she had lost them.
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