come in. He had not come in, but he was
expected, and I was invited to enter and wait for him: a lady, I was
informed, was already in his sitting-room. I hesitated, a little at a
loss: it had wildly coursed through my brain that the lady was perhaps
Flora Saunt. But when I asked if she were young and remarkably pretty I
received so significant a "No sir!" that I risked an advance and after a
minute in this manner found myself, to my astonishment, face to face with
Mrs. Meldrum.

"Oh you dear thing," she exclaimed, "I'm delighted to see you: you spare
me another compromising demarche! But for this I should have called on
you also. Know the worst at once: if you see me here it's at least
deliberate--it's planned, plotted, shameless. I came up on purpose to
see him, upon my word I'm in love with him. Why, if you valued my peace
of mind, did you let him the other day at Folkestone dawn upon my
delighted eyes? I found myself there in half an hour simply infatuated
with him. With a perfect sense of everything that can be urged against
him I hold him none the less the very pearl of men. However, I haven't
come up to declare my passion--I've come to bring him news that will
interest him much more. Above all I've come to urge upon him to be
careful."

"About Flora Saunt?"

"About what he says and does: he must be as still as a mouse! She's at
last really engaged."

"But it's a tremendous secret?" I was moved to mirth.

"Precisely: she wired me this noon, and spent another shilling to tell me
that not a creature in the world is yet to know it."

"She had better have spent it to tell you that she had just passed an
hour with the creature you see before you."

"She has just passed an hour with every one in the place!" Mrs. Meldrum
cried. "They've vital reasons, she says, for it's not coming out for a
month. Then it will be formally announced, but meanwhile her rejoicing
is wild. I daresay Mr. Dawling already knows and, as it's nearly seven
o'clock, may have jumped off London Bridge. But an effect of the talk I
had with him the other day was to make me, on receipt of my telegram,
feel it to be my duty to warn him in person against taking action, so to
call it, on the horrid certitude which I could see he carried away with
him. I had added somehow to that certitude. He told me what you had
told him you had seen in your shop."

Mrs. Meldrum, I perceived, had come to Welbeck Street on an errand
identical w