"Of whom to you speak, Isabel ?" "Of Barbara Hare." He knitted his brow; he was both annoyed and vexed.

Whatever had put this bygone nonsense into his wife's head?
He quitted the sofa where he had been supporting her, and stood upright before her, calm, dignified, almost solemn in his seriousness.
"Isabel, what notion can you possibly have picked up about myself and Barbara Hare; I never entertained the faintest shadow of love for her, either before my marriage or since.

You must tell me what has given rise to this idea in your mind." "But she loved you." A moment's hesitation; for, of course, Mr.Carlyle was conscious that she had; but, taking all the circumstances into consideration, more especially how he learnt the fact, he could not, in honor, acknowledge it to his wife.

"If it was so, Isabel, she was more reprehensibly foolish than I should have given Barbara's good sense could be; for a woman may almost as well lose herself as to suffer herself to love unsought.

If she did give her love to me, I can only say, I was entirely unconscious of it.