see her!" I
forget whether he had come straight from the station; he was at any rate
out of breath with his news, which it took me however a minute to apply.

"You mean that you've been with Mrs. Meldrum?"

"Yes, to ask her what she knows and how she comes to know it. It worked
upon me awfully--I mean what you told me." He made a visible effort to
seem quieter than he was, and it showed me sufficiently that he had not
been reassured. I laid, to comfort him and smiling at a venture, a
friendly hand on his arm, and he dropped into my eyes, fixing them an
instant, a strange distended look which might have expressed the cold
clearness of all that was to come. "I _know--_now!" he said with an
emphasis he rarely used.

"What then did Mrs. Meldrum tell you?"

"Only one thing that signified, for she has no real knowledge. But that
one thing was everything."

"What is it then?"

"Why, that she can't bear the sight of her." His pronouns required some
arranging, but after I had successfully dealt with them I replied that I
was quite aware of Miss Saunt's trick of turning her back on the good
lady of Folkestone. Only what did that prove? "Have you never guessed?
I guessed as soon as she spoke!" Dawling towered over me in dismal
triumph. It was the first time in our acquaintance that, on any ground
of understanding this had occurred; but even so remarkable an incident
still left me sufficiently at sea to cause him to continue: "Why, the
effect of those spectacles!"

I seemed to catch the tail of his idea. "Mrs. Meldrum's?"

"They're so awfully ugly and they add so to the dear woman's ugliness."
This remark began to flash a light, and when he quickly added "She sees
herself, she sees her own fate!" my response was so immediate that I had
almost taken the words out of his mouth. While I tried to fix this
sudden image of Flora's face glazed in and cross-barred even as Mrs.
Meldrum's was glazed and barred, he went on to assert that only the
horror of that image, looming out at herself, could be the reason of her
avoiding the person who so forced it home. The fact he had encountered
made everything hideously vivid, and more vivid than anything else that
just such another pair of goggles was what would have been prescribed to
Flora.

"I see--I see," I presently returned. "What would become of Lord Iffield
if she were suddenly to come out in them? What indeed would become of
every one, what would become of everyt