Chapter 9 - Page 2

"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 mirth.

"Precisely: she wired 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 says, for it's not
coming out for a month. Then it will be formally announced, but
meanwhile her rejoicing is wild. I daresay Mr. Dawling already
knows and, as it's nearly seven o'clock, may 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, so to call it, 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 in the nature of 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 utterly committed to
her 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 that day at Folkestone when I asked her
for the truth about her eyes. The truth is what you and I both
guessed. She's in very bad danger."

"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 in time, done years ago, what was imperatively ordered
her; if she hadn't in fine been cursed with the loveliness that was
to make her behaviour a thing of fable. She may still keep her
sight, or what remains of it, if she'll sacrifice--and after all so
little--that purely superficial charm. She must do as you've