"You must be very tired," said Isabel, seating herself, and generously, as she thought, to give him his opportunity.
"No, I'm not at all tired. Did you ever know me to be tired?"
"Never; I wish I had! When did you arrive?"
"Last night, very late; in a kind of snail-train they call the express. These Italian trains go at about the rate of an American funeral."
"That's in keeping--you must have felt as if you were coming to bury me!" And she forced a smile of encouragement to an easy view of their situation. She had reasoned the matter well out, making it perfectly clear that she broke no faith and falsified no contract; but for all this she was afraid of her visitor. She was ashamed of her fear; but she was devoutly thankful there was nothing else to be ashamed of. He looked at her with his stiff insistence, an insistence in which there was such a want of tact; especially when the dull dark beam in his eye rested on her as a physical weight.
"No, I didn't feel that; I couldn't think of you as dead. I wish I could!" he candidly declared.
"I thank you immensely."
"I'd rather think of you as dead than as married to another man."
"That's very selfish of you!" she returned with the ardour of a real conviction. "If you're not happy yourself others have yet a right to be."
"Very likely it's selfish; but I don't in the least mind your saying so. I don't mind anything you can say now--I don't feel it. The cruellest things you could think of would be mere pin-pricks. After what you've done I shall never feel anything--I mean anything but that. That I shall feel all my life."
Mr. Goodwood made these detached assertions with dry deliberateness, in his hard, slow American tone, which flung no atmospheric colour over propositions intrinsically crude. The tone made Isabel angry rather than touched her; but her anger perhaps was fortunate, inasmuch as it gave her a further reason for controlling herself. It was under the pressure of this control that she became, after a little, irrelevant. "When did you leave New York?"
He threw up his head as if calculating. "Seventeen days ago."
"You must have travelled fast in spite of your slow trains."
"I came as fast as I could. I'd have come five days ago if I had been able."
"It wouldn't have made any difference, Mr. Goodwood," she coldly smiled.