Chapter 13

She gave me the smile once more as over her shoulder, from her
chair, she turned her face to me. "Here you are again!" she
exclaimed with her disgloved hand put up a little backward for me
to take. I dropped into a chair just behind her and, having taken
it and noted that one of the curtains of the box would make the
demonstration sufficiently private, bent my lips over it and
impressed them on its finger-tips. It was given me however, to my
astonishment, to feel next that all the privacy in the world
couldn't have sufficed to mitigate the start with which she greeted
this free application of my moustache: the blood had jumped to her
face, she quickly recovered her hand and jerked at me, twisting
herself round, a vacant challenging stare. During the next few
instants several extraordinary things happened, the first of which
was that now I was close to them the eyes of loveliness I had come
up to look into didn't show at all the conscious light I had just
been pleased to see them flash across the house: they showed on
the contrary, to my confusion, a strange sweet blankness, an
expression I failed to give a meaning to until, without delay, I
felt on my arm, directed to it as if instantly to efface the effect
of her start, the grasp of the hand she had impulsively snatched
from me. It was the irrepressible question in this grasp that
stopped on my lips all sound of salutation. She had mistaken my
entrance for that of another person, a pair of lips without a
moustache. She was feeling me to see who I was! With the
perception of this and of her not seeing me I sat gaping at her and
at the wild word that didn't come, the right word to express or to
disguise my dismay. What was the right word to commemorate one's
sudden discovery, at the very moment too at which one had been most
encouraged to count on better things, that one's dear old friend
had gone blind? Before the answer to this question dropped upon
me--and the moving moments, though few, seemed many--I heard, with
the sound of voices, the click of the attendant's key on the other
side of the door. Poor Flora heard also and on hearing, still with
her hand on my arm, brightened again as I had a minute since seen
her brighten across the house: she had the sense of the return of
the person she had taken me for--the person with the right 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