oor; cabmen, upon her honour, in London, who, to gaze
their fill at her, had found excuses to thrust their petrifaction through
the very glasses of four-wheelers. She lost herself in these
reminiscences, the moral of which was that poor Mr. Dawling was only one
of a million. When therefore the next autumn she flourished into my
studio with her odd companion at her heels her first care was to make
clear to me that if he was now in servitude it wasn't because she had run
after him. Dawling explained with a hundred grins that when one wished
very much to get anything one usually ended by doing so--a proposition
which led me wholly to dissent and our young lady to asseverate that she
hadn't in the least wished to get Mr. Dawling. She mightn't have wished
to get him, but she wished to show him, and I seemed to read that if she
could treat him as a trophy her affairs were rather at the ebb. True
there always hung from her belt a promiscuous fringe of scalps. Much at
any rate would have come and gone since our separation in July. She had
spent four months abroad, where, on Swiss and Italian lakes, in German
cities, in the French capital, many accidents might have happened.

CHAPTER V

I had been again with my mother, but except Mrs. Meldrum and the gleam of
France had not found at Folkestone my old resources and pastimes. Mrs.
Meldrum, much edified by my report of the performances, as she called
them, in my studio, had told me that to her knowledge Flora would soon be
on the straw: she had cut from her capital such fine fat slices that
there was almost nothing more left to swallow. Perched on her breezy
cliff the good lady dazzled me as usual by her universal light: she knew
so much more about everything and everybody than I could ever squeeze out
of my colour-tubes. She knew that Flora was acting on system and
absolutely declined to be interfered with: her precious reasoning was
that her money would last as long as she should need it, that a
magnificent marriage would crown her charms before she should be really
pinched. She had a sum put by for a liberal outfit; meanwhile the proper
use of the rest was to decorate her for the approaches to the altar, keep
her afloat in the society in which she would most naturally meet her
match. Lord Iffield had been seen with her at Lucerne, at Cadenabbia;
but it was Mrs. Meldrum's conviction that nothing was to be expected of
him but the most futile flirtation. The gi