pair of lips, as to whom I was for that
matter much more in the dark than she. I gasped, but my word had come:
if she had lost her sight it was in this very loss that she had found
again her beauty. I managed to speak while we were still alone, before
her companion had appeared. "You're lovelier at this day than you
have ever been in your life!" At the sound of my voice and that of the
opening of the door her excitement broke into audible joy. She sprang
up, recognising me, always holding me, and gleefully cried to a
gentleman who was arrested in the doorway by the sight of me: "He has
come back, he has come back, and you should have heard what he says of
me!" The gentleman was Geoffrey Dawling, and I thought it best to
let him hear on the spot. "How beautiful she is, my dear man--but how
extraordinarily beautiful! More beautiful at this hour than ever, ever
before!"

It gave them almost equal pleasure and made Dawling blush up to his
eyes; while this in turn produced, in spite of deepened astonishment,
a blessed snap of the strain that I had been under for some moments. I
wanted to embrace them both, and while the opening bars of another
scene rose from the orchestra I almost did embrace Dawling, whose
first emotion on beholding me had visibly and ever so oddly been a
consciousness of guilt. I had caught him somehow in the act, though that
was as yet all I knew; but by the time we had sunk noiselessly into
our chairs again (for the music was supreme, Wagner passed first) my
demonstration ought pretty well to have given him the limit of the
criticism he had to fear. I myself indeed, while the opera blazed, was
only too afraid he might divine in our silent closeness the very moral
of my optimism, which was simply the comfort I had gathered from seeing
that if our companion's beauty lived again her vanity partook of its
life. I had hit on the right note--that was what eased me off: it drew
all pain for the next half-hour from the sense of the deep darkness
in which the stricken woman sat there. If the music, in that darkness,
happily soared and swelled for her, it beat its wings in unison with
those of a gratified passion. A great deal came and went between us
without profaning the occasion, so that I could feel at the end of
twenty minutes as if I knew almost everything he might in kindness have
to tell me; knew even why Flora, while I stared at her from the stalls,
had misled me by the use of ivory and crystal and by ap