im to be careful."

"About Flora Saunt?"

"About what he says and does: he must be as still as a mouse! She's at
last really engaged."

"But it's a tremendous secret?" I was moved to merriment.

"Precisely: she telegraphed me this noon, and spent another shilling to
tell me that not a creature in the world is yet to know it."

"She had better have spent it to tell you that she had just passed an
hour with the creature you see before you."

"She has just passed an hour with every one in the place!" Mrs. Meldrum
cried. "They've vital reasons, she wired, for it's not coming out for a
month. Then it will be formally announced, but meanwhile her happiness
is delirious. I daresay Mr. Dawling already knows, and he may, as it's
nearly seven o'clock, have jumped off London Bridge; but an effect of
the talk I had with him the other day was to make me, on receipt of my
telegram, feel it to be my duty to warn him in person against taking
action, as it were, on the horrid certitude which I could see he carried
away with him. I had added somehow to that certitude. He told me what
you had told him you had seen in your shop."

Mrs. Meldrum, I perceived, had come to Welbeck Street on an errand
identical with my own--a circumstance indicating her rare sagacity,
inasmuch as her ground for undertaking it was a very different thing
from what Flora's wonderful visit had made of mine. I remarked to her
that what I had seen in the shop was sufficiently striking, but that
I had seen a great deal more that morning in my studio. "In short," I
said, "I've seen everything."

She was mystified. "Everything?"

"The poor creature is under the darkest of clouds. Oh, she came to
triumph, but she remained to talk something approaching to sense! She
put herself completely in my hands--she does me the honour to intimate
that of all her friends I'm the most disinterested. After she had
announced to me that Lord Iffield was bound hands and feet and that for
the present I was absolutely the only person in the secret, she arrived
at her real business. She had had a suspicion of me ever since the day,
at Folkestone, I asked her for the truth about her eyes. The truth is
what you and I both guessed. She has no end of a danger hanging over
her."

"But from what cause? I, who by God's mercy have kept mine, know
everything that can be known about eyes," said Mrs. Meldrum.

"She might have kept hers if she had profited by God's mercy, if she had
done i