.
This concentration, in turn, may be described as the effect of the
apprehension of imminent relief. It was nineteen days, counted and
checked off, since she had seen the object of her homage; and as, had he
been in London, she should, with his habits, have been sure to see him
often, she was now about to learn what other spot his presence might just
then happen to sanctify. For she thought of them, the other spots, as
ecstatically conscious of it, expressively happy in it.

But, gracious, how handsome was her ladyship, and what an added price it
gave him that the air of intimacy he threw out should have flowed
originally from such a source! The girl looked straight through the cage
at the eyes and lips that must so often have been so near as own--looked
at them with a strange passion that for an instant had the result of
filling out some of the gaps, supplying the missing answers, in his
correspondence. Then as she made out that the features she thus scanned
and associated were totally unaware of it, that they glowed only with the
colour of quite other and not at all guessable thoughts, this directly
added to their splendour, gave the girl the sharpest impression she had
yet received of the uplifted, the unattainable plains of heaven, and yet
at the same time caused her to thrill with a sense of the high company
she did somehow keep. She was with the absent through her ladyship and
with her ladyship through the absent. The only pang--but it didn't
matter--was the proof in the admirable face, in the sightless
preoccupation of its possessor, that the latter hadn't a notion of her.
Her folly had gone to the point of half believing that the other party to
the affair must sometimes mention in Eaton Square the extraordinary
little person at the place from which he so often wired. Yet the
perception of her visitor's blankness actually helped this extraordinary
little person, the next instant, to take refuge in a reflexion that could
be as proud as it liked. "How little she knows, how little she knows!"
the girl cried to herself; for what did that show after all but that
Captain Everard's telegraphic confidant was Captain Everard's charming
secret? Our young friend's perusal of her ladyship's telegram was
literally prolonged by a momentary daze: what swam between her and the
words, making her see them as through rippled shallow sunshot water, was
the great, the perpetual flood of "How much _I_ know--how much _I_ know!