t in his triumph, he described his
discovery as stupendous; but his ecstasy only obscured it--there were
to be no particulars till he should have submitted his conception to the
supreme authority. He had thrown up his commission, he had thrown up
his book, he had thrown up everything but the instant need to hurry to
Rapallo, on the Genoese shore, where Vereker was making a stay. I wrote
him a letter which was to await him at Aden--I besought him to relieve
my suspense. That he found my letter was indicated by a telegram which,
reaching me after weary days and without my having received an answer to
my laconic dispatch at Bombay, was evidently intended as a reply to both
communications. Those few words were in familiar French, the French of
the day, which Corvick often made use of to show he wasn't a prig. It
had for some persons the opposite effect, but his message may fairly
be paraphrased. "Have patience; I want to see, as it breaks on you, the
face you'll make!" "_Tellement envie de voir ta tete!_"--that was what I
had to sit down with. I can certainly not be said to have sat down, for
I seem to remember myself at this time as rushing constantly between
the little house in Chelsea and my own. Our impatience, Gwendolen's and
mine, was equal, but I kept hoping her light would be greater. We all
spent during this episode, for people of our means, a great deal of
money in telegrams, and I counted on the receipt of news from Rapallo
immediately after the junction of the discoverer with the discovered.
The interval seemed an age, but late one day I heard a hansom rattle up
to my door with a crash engendered by a hint of liberality. I lived with
my heart in my mouth and I bounded to the window--a movement which gave
me a view of a young lady erect on the footboard of the vehicle and
eagerly looking up at my house. At sight of me she flourished a paper
with a movement that brought me straight down, the movement with which,
in melodramas, handkerchiefs and reprieves are flourished at the foot of
the scaffold.

"Just seen Vereker--not a note wrong. Pressed me to bosom--keeps me a
month." So much I read on her paper while the cabby dropped a grin
from his perch. In my excitement I paid him profusely and in hers she
suffered it; then as he drove away we started to walk about and talk. We
had talked, 'heaven knows, enough before, but this was a wondrous lift.
We pictured the whole scene at Rapallo, where he would have written,
me