s not accountable. She had but one thought in
the world, and that thought was for Lord Iffield. I had the strangest,
saddest scene with her, and if it did me no other good it at least made
me at last completely understand why insidiously, from the first, she
had struck me as a creature of tragedy. In showing me the whole of her
folly it lifted the curtain of her misery. I don't know how much she
meant to tell me when she came--I think she had had plans of elaborate
misrepresentation; at any rate she found it at the end of ten minutes
the simplest way to break down and sob, to be wretched and true. When
she had once begun to let herself go the movement took her off her feet:
the relief of it was like the cessation of a cramp. She shared in a word
her long secret; she shifted her sharp pain. She brought, I confess,
tears to my own eyes, tears of helpless tenderness for her helpless
poverty. Her visit however was not quite so memorable in itself as in
some of its consequences, the most immediate of which was that I went
that afternoon to see Geoffrey Dawling, who had in those days rooms
in Welbeck Street, where I presented myself at an hour late enough to
warrant the supposition that he might have come in. He had not come
in, but he was expected, and I was invited to enter and wait for him:
a lady, I was informed, was already in his sitting-room. I hesitated, a
little at a loss: it had wildly coursed through my brain that the
lady was perhaps Flora Saunt. But when I asked if she were young and
remarkably pretty I received so significant a "No, sir!" that I risked
an advance and after a minute in this manner found myself, to my
astonishment, face to face with Mrs. Meldrum. "Oh, you dear thing," she
exclaimed, "I'm delighted to see you: you spare me another compromising
_demarche!_ But for this I should have called on you also. Know the
worst at once: if you see me here it's at least deliberate--it's
planned, plotted, shameless. I came up on purpose to see him; upon my
word, I'm in love with him. Why, if you valued my peace of mind, did
you let him, the other day at Folkestone, dawn upon my delighted eyes?
I took there in half an hour the most extraordinary fancy to him. With
a perfect sense of everything that can be urged against him, I find
him none the less the very pearl of men. However, I haven't come up to
declare my passion--I've come to bring him news that will interest him
much more. Above all I've come to urge upon h