see by what a stretch his
passionate pity would from this moment overlook the girl's fatuity and
folly. She was always accessible to him--that I knew; for if she had
told him he was an idiot to dream she could dream of him, she would have
rebuked the imputation of having failed to make it clear that she would
always be glad to regard him as a friend. What were most of her
friends--what were all of them--but repudiated idiots? I was perfectly
aware that in her conversations and confidences I myself for instance had
a niche in the gallery. As regards poor Dawling I knew how often he
still called on the Hammond Synges. It was not there but under the wing
of the Floyd-Taylors that her intimacy with Lord Iffield most flourished.
At all events, when a week after the visit I have just summarised Flora's
name was one morning brought up to me, I jumped at the conclusion that
Dawling had been with her, and even I fear briefly entertained the
thought that he had broken his word.

CHAPTER IX

She left me, after she had been introduced, in no suspense about her
present motive; she was on the contrary in a visible fever to enlighten
me; but I promptly learned that for the alarm with which she pitiably
panted our young man was not accountable. She had but one thought in the
world, and that thought was for Lord Iffield. I had the strangest
saddest scene with her, and if it did me no other good it at least made
me at last completely understand why insidiously, from the first, she had
struck me as a creature of tragedy. In showing me the whole of her folly
it lifted the curtain of her misery. I don't know how much she meant to
tell me when she came--I think she had had plans of elaborate
misrepresentation; at any rate she found it at the end of ten minutes the
simplest way to break down and sob, to be wretched and true. When she
had once begun to let herself go the movement took her off her feet; the
relief of it was like the cessation of a cramp. She shared in a word her
long secret, she shifted her sharp pain. She brought, I confess, tears
to my own eyes, tears of helpless tenderness for her helpless poverty.
Her visit however was not quite so memorable in itself as in some of its
consequences, the most immediate of which was that I went that afternoon
to see Geoffrey Dawling, who had in those days rooms in Welbeck Street,
where I presented myself at an hour late enough to warrant the
supposition that he might have