Chapter 9

She left me, after she had been introduced, in no suspense about
her present motive; she was on the contrary in a visible fever to
enlighten me; but I promptly learned that for the alarm with which
she pitiably panted our young man was 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 found myself there in
half an hour simply infatuated with him. With a perfect sense of
everything that can be urged against him I hold 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 him to be careful."

"About Flora Saunt?"