er feeling her noble suitor had
perhaps served her right; but after a while my curiosity as to just how
her noble suitor _had_ served her got the better of that emotion, and I
asked a question or two which led my companion again to apply to him the
invidious term I have already quoted. What had happened was simply that
Flora had at the eleventh hour broken down in the attempt to put him off
with an uncandid account of her infirmity and that his lordship's
interest in her had not been proof against the discovery of the way she
had practised on him. Her dissimulation, he was obliged to perceive, had
been infernally deep. The future in short assumed a new complexion for
him when looked at through the grim glasses of a bride who, as he had
said to some one, couldn't really, when you came to find out, see her
hand before her face. He had conducted himself like any other jockeyed
customer--he had returned the animal as unsound. He had backed out in
his own way, giving the business, by some sharp shuffle, such a turn as
to make the rupture ostensibly Flora's, but he had none the less
remorselessly and basely backed out. He had cared for her lovely face,
cared for it in the amused and haunted way it had been her poor little
delusive gift to make men care; and her lovely face, damn it, with the
monstrous gear she had begun to rig upon it, was just what had let him
in. He had in the judgment of his family done everything that could be
expected of him; he had made--Mrs. Meldrum had herself seen the letter--a
"handsome" offer of pecuniary compensation. Oh if Flora, with her
incredible buoyancy, was in a manner on her feet again now it was not
that she had not for weeks and weeks been prone in the dust. Strange
were the humiliations, the forms of anguish, it was given some natures to
survive. That Flora had survived was perhaps after all a proof she was
reserved for some final mercy. "But she has been in the abysses at any
rate," said Mrs. Meldrum, "and I really don't think I can tell you what
pulled her through."

"I think I can tell _you_," I returned. "What in the world but Mrs.
Meldrum?"

At the end of an hour Flora had not come in, and I was obliged to
announce that I should have but time to reach the station, where I was to
find my luggage in charge of my mother's servant. Mrs. Meldrum put
before me the question of waiting till a later train, so as not to lose
our young lady, but I confess I gave this alternative