he expressed his wish to possess it and fell into the extremity
of confusion over the question of price. I helped him over that stile,
and he went off without having asked me a direct question about Miss
Saunt, yet with his acquisition under his arm. His delicacy was such
that he evidently considered his rights to be limited; he had acquired
none at all in regard to the original of the picture. There were
others--for I was curious about him--that I wanted him to feel I
conceded: I should have been glad of his carrying away a sense of ground
acquired for coming back. To ensure this I had probably only to invite
him, and I perfectly recall the impulse that made me forbear. It
operated suddenly from within while he hung about the door and in spite
of the diffident appeal that blinked in his gentle grin. If he was
smitten with Flora's ghost what mightn't be the direct force of the
luminary that could cast such a shadow? This source of radiance,
flooding my poor place, might very well happen to be present the next
time he should turn up. The idea was sharp within me that there were
relations and complications it was no mission of mine to bring about. If
they were to develop they should develop in their very own sense.

Let me say at once that they did develop and that I perhaps after all had
something to do with it. If Mr. Dawling had departed without a fresh
appointment he was to reappear six months later under protection no less
powerful than that of our young lady herself. I had seen her repeatedly
for months: she had grown to regard my studio as the temple of her
beauty. This miracle was recorded and celebrated there as nowhere else;
in other places there was occasional reference to other subjects of
remark. The degree of her presumption continued to be stupefying; there
was nothing so extraordinary save the degree in which she never paid for
it. She was kept innocent, that is she was kept safe, by her egotism,
but she was helped also, though she had now put off her mourning, by the
attitude of the lone orphan who had to be a law unto herself. It was as
a lone orphan that she came and went, as a lone orphan that she was the
centre of a crush. The neglect of the Hammond Synges gave relief to this
character, and she made it worth their while to be, as every one said,
too shocking. Lord Iffield had gone to India to shoot tigers, but he
returned in time for the punctual private view: it was he who had snapped