hes to lonely loveliness in public places, an agreeable mystery. A
mystery however she remained to me only for a minute after I had levelled
my glass at her: I feel to this moment the startled thrill, the shock
almost of joy, with which I translated her vague brightness into a
resurrection of Flora. I say a resurrection, because, to put it crudely,
I had on that last occasion left our young woman for dead. At present
perfectly alive again, she was altered only, as it were, by this fact of
life. A little older, a little quieter, a little finer and a good deal
fairer, she was simply transfigured by having recovered. Sustained by
the reflection that even her recovery wouldn't enable her to distinguish
me in the crowd, I was free to look at her well. Then it was it came
home to me that my vision of her in her great goggles had been cruelly
final. As her beauty was all there was of her, that machinery had
extinguished her, and so far as I had thought of her in the interval I
had thought of her as buried in the tomb her stern specialist had built.
With the sense that she had escaped from it came a lively wish to return
to her; and if I didn't straightway leave my place and rush round the
theatre and up to her box it was because I was fixed to the spot some
moments longer by the simple inability to cease looking at her.

She had been from the first of my seeing her practically motionless,
leaning back in her chair with a kind of thoughtful grace and with her
eyes vaguely directed, as it seemed on me, to one of the boxes on my side
of the house and consequently over my head and out of my sight. The only
movement she made for some time was to finger with an ungloved hand and
as if with the habit of fondness the row of pearls on her neck, which my
glass showed me to be large and splendid. Her diamonds and pearls, in
her solitude, mystified me, making me, as she had had no such brave
jewels in the days of the Hammond Synges, wonder what undreamt-of
improvement had taken place in her fortunes. The ghost of a question
hovered there a moment: could anything so prodigious have happened as
that on her tested and proved amendment Lord Iffield had taken her back?
This could scarce have without my hearing of it; and moreover if she had
become a person of such fashion where was the little court one would
naturally see at her elbow? Her isolation was puzzling, though it could
easily suggest that she was but momentarily alone. If s