ome into the paternal estate, two or three thousand
a year in Hampshire; but he had let the place advantageously and was
generous to four ugly sisters who lived at Bournemouth and adored him.
The family was hideous all round, but the salt of the earth. He was
supposed to be unspeakably clever; he was fond of London, fond of books,
of intellectual society and of the idea of a political career. That such
a man should be at the same time fond of Flora Saunt attested, as
the phrase in the first volume of Gibbon has it, the variety of his
inclinations. I was soon to learn that he was fonder of her than of all
the other things together. Betty, one of five and with views above her
station, was at any rate felt at home to have dished herself by her
perversity. Of course no one had looked at her since and no one would
ever look at her again. It would be eminently desirable that Flora
should learn the lesson of Betty's fate.

I was not struck, I confess, with all this in my mind, by any symptoms
on our young lady's part of that sort of meditation. The only moral
she saw in anything was that of her incomparable countenance, which Mr.
Dawling, smitten even like the railway porters and the cabmen by the
doom-dealing gods, had followed from London to Venice and from Venice
back to London again. I afterwards learned that her version of this
episode was profusely inexact: his personal acquaintance with her had
been determined by an accident remarkable enough, I admit, in connection
with what had gone before--a coincidence at all events superficially
striking. At Munich, returning from a tour in the Tyrol with two of his
sisters, he had found himself at the _table d'hote_ of his inn opposite
to the full presentment of that face of which the mere clumsy copy
had made him dream and desire. He had been tossed by it to a height so
vertiginous as to involve a retreat from the table; but the next day he
had dropped with a resounding thud at the very feet of his apparition.
On the following, with an equal incoherence, a sacrifice even of his
bewildered sisters, whom he left behind, he made an heroic effort to
escape by flight from a fate of which he already felt the cold breath.
That fate, in London, very little later, drove him straight before
it--drove him one Sunday afternoon, in the rain, to the door of the
Hammond Synges. He marched in other words close up to the cannon that
was to blow him to pieces. But three weeks, when he reappeared to