Chapter 8

A few days later I again heard Dawling on my stairs, and even
before he passed my threshold I knew he had something to tell.

"I've been down to Folkestone--it was necessary I should see her!"
I forget whether he had come straight from the station; he was at
any rate out of breath with his news, which it took me however a
minute to apply.

"You mean that you've been with Mrs. Meldrum?"

"Yes, to ask her what she knows and how she comes to know it. It
worked upon me awfully--I mean what you told me." He made a
visible effort to seem quieter than he was, and it showed me
sufficiently that he had not been reassured. I laid, to comfort
him and smiling at a venture, a friendly hand on his arm, and he
dropped into my eyes, fixing them an instant, a strange distended
look which might have expressed the cold clearness of all that was
to come. "I KNOW--now!" he said with an emphasis he rarely used.

"What then did Mrs. Meldrum tell you?"

"Only one thing that signified, for she has no real knowledge. But
that one thing was everything."

"What is it then?"

"Why, that she can't bear the sight of her." His pronouns required
some arranging, but after I had successfully dealt with them I
replied that I was quite aware of Miss Saunt's trick of turning her
back on the good lady of Folkestone. Only what did that prove?
"Have you never guessed? I guessed as soon as she spoke!" Dawling
towered over me in dismal triumph. It was the first time in our
acquaintance that, on any ground of understanding this had
occurred; but even so remarkable an incident still left me
sufficiently at sea to cause him to continue: "Why, the effect of
those spectacles!"

I seemed to catch the tail of his idea. "Mrs. Meldrum's?"

"They're so awfully ugly and they add so to the dear woman's
ugliness." This remark began to flash a light, and when he quickly
added "She sees herself, she sees her own fate!" my response was so
immediate that I had almost taken the words out of his mouth.
While I tried to fix this sudden image of Flora's face glazed in
and cross-barred even as Mrs. Meldrum's was glazed and barred, he
went on to assert that only the horror of that image, looming out
at herself, could be the reason of her avoiding the person who so
forced it home. The fact he had encountered made everything
hideously vivid, and more vivid than anything else that just such
another pair of goggles was what would have been prescribed to
Flora.

"I see--I see," I presently returned. "What would become of Lord
Iffield if she were suddenly to come out in them? What indeed
would become of every one, what would become of everything?" This
was an enquiry that Dawling was evidently unprepared to