sonality, seemed, as out of
the orifice of a prison, to strain forward and press. The face had
shrunk away: it looked smaller, appeared even to look plain; it was at
all events, so far as the effect on a spectator was concerned, wholly
sacrificed to this huge apparatus of sight. There was no smile in it,
and she made no motion to take my offered hand.

"I had no idea you were down here!" I said and I wondered whether she
didn't know me at all or knew me only by my voice.

"You thought I was Mrs. Meldrum," she ever so quietly answered.

It was just this low pitch that made me protest with laughter. "Oh yes,
you have a tremendous deal in common with Mrs. Meldrum! I've just
returned to England after a long absence and I'm on my way to see her.
Won't you come with me?" It struck me that her old reason for keeping
clear of our friend was well disposed of now.

"I've just left her. I'm staying with her." She stood solemnly fixing
me with her goggles. "Would you like to paint me now?" she asked. She
seemed to speak, with intense gravity, from behind a mask or a cage.

There was nothing to do but treat the question still with high spirits.
"It would be a fascinating little artistic problem!" That something was
wrong it wasn't difficult to see, but a good deal more than met the eye
might be presumed to be wrong if Flora was under Mrs. Meldrum's roof. I
hadn't for a year had much time to think of her, but my imagination had
had ground for lodging her in more gilded halls. One of the last things
I had heard before leaving England was that in commemoration of the new
relationship she had gone to stay with Lady Considine. This had made me
take everything else for granted, and the noisy American world had
deafened my care to possible contradictions. Her spectacles were at
present a direct contradiction; they seemed a negation not only of new
relationships but of every old one as well. I remember nevertheless that
when after a moment she walked beside me on the grass I found myself
nervously hoping she wouldn't as yet at any rate tell me anything very
dreadful; so that to stave off this danger I harried her with questions
about Mrs. Meldrum and, without waiting for replies, became profuse on
the subject of my own doings. My companion was finely silent, and I felt
both as if she were watching my nervousness with a sort of sinister irony
and as if I were talking to some different and strange person. Flora
plain and