‘I hate this country of yours! I always did hate it! I don’t know what made me such an ass as to consent to stay. By Jove! I wonder if any woman was ever worth----’ ‘What, Horace?’ she said, trying to laugh. ‘The things we do for them,’ he said. ‘You are a kind of demons with your pretty faces. You tempt us to do a thousand things that if we had our wits about us----’ ‘Horace, we have surely something more than pretty faces? Is that all you care for?’ said Isabel. ‘Well, never mind,’ he said, coarsely; ‘if you were plain, you would not ask such a question; but if you had been plain, Isabel, you should never have been my wife.’ He expected her to be pleased with the rough compliment: and, pleased himself, roused up a little out of the shadow, and suffered his face to relax and looked at her as at a picture. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you should never have been my wife. I never thought, even when I admired you most in the old times, that you would have turned out so handsome, Isabel; and when I look at you I don’t mind----’ ‘What is it you don’t mind?’ ‘All you have cost me,’ he said, falling back into the shadow. ‘By Heaven that night at the opera, when I saw you dazzling--you whom I had been persuading myself to believe was only a pretty country girl. And there you were like a queen of beauty. I shall never forget how I felt that night.’ ‘Oh, don’t speak of it!’ she cried. ‘I cannot bear it; don’t remind me of that.’ ‘If I could bear it, you may,’ he said, with a certain tone of contempt; ‘but I don’t mind, you are worth it all, my dear; and now let us have some dinner. I have got you in spite of everything, and at least we may be jolly to-night.’