I was left with nothing but my inference as to what
might have happened. Later observation however only confirmed my belief
that if at any time during the couple of months after Flora Saunt's
brilliant engagement he had made up, as they say, to the good lady of
Folkestone, that good lady would not have pushed him over the cliff.
Strange as she was to behold I knew of cases in which she had been
obliged to administer that shove. I went to New York to paint a couple
of portraits; but I found, once on the spot, that I had counted without
Chicago, where I was invited to blot out this harsh discrimination by the
production of some dozen. I spent a year in America and should probably
have spent a second had I not been summoned back to England by alarming
news from my mother. Her strength had failed, and as soon as I reached
London I hurried down to Folkestone, arriving just at the moment to offer
a welcome to some slight symptom of a rally. She had been much worse but
was now a little better; and though I found nothing but satisfaction in
having come to her I saw after a few hours that my London studio, where
arrears of work had already met me, would be my place to await whatever
might next occur. Yet before returning to town I called on Mrs. Meldrum,
from whom I had not had a line, and my view of whom, with the adjacent
objects, as I had left them, had been intercepted by a luxuriant
foreground.

Before I had gained her house I met her, as I supposed, coming toward me
across the down, greeting me from afar with the familiar twinkle of her
great vitreous badge; and as it was late in the autumn and the esplanade
a blank I was free to acknowledge this signal by cutting a caper on the
grass. My enthusiasm dropped indeed the next moment, for I had seen in a
few more seconds that the person thus assaulted had by no means the
figure of my military friend. I felt a shock much greater than any I
should have thought possible when on this person's drawing near I knew
her for poor little Flora Saunt. At what moment she had recognised me
belonged to an order of mysteries over which, it quickly came home to me,
one would never linger again: once we were face to face it so chiefly
mattered that I should succeed in looking entirely unastonished. All I
at first saw was the big gold bar crossing each of her lenses, over which
something convex and grotesque, like the eyes of a large insect,
something that now represented her whole per