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Mrs. Meldrum had held her breath; she gave out a long moan. “Well, that’s exactly what I came here to tell him.”

“Then here he is.” Our host, all unprepared, his latchkey still in his hand, had just pushed open the door and, startled at finding us, turned a frightened look from one to the other, wondering what disaster we were there to announce or avert.

Mrs. Meldrum was on the spot all gaiety. “I’ve come to return your sweet visit. Ah,” she laughed, “I mean to keep up the acquaintance!”

“Do–do,” he murmured mechanically and absently, continuing to look at us. Then he broke out: “He’s going to marry her.”

I was surprised. “You already know?”

He produced an evening paper, which he tossed down on the table. “It’s in that.”

“Published–already?” I was still more surprised.

“Oh Flora can’t keep a secret!”–Mrs. Meldrum made it light. She went up to poor Dawling and laid a motherly hand upon him.

“It’s all right–it’s just as it ought to be: don’t think about her ever any more.” Then as he met this adjuration with a stare from which thought, and of the most defiant and dismal, fairly protruded, the excellent woman put up her funny face and tenderly kissed him on the cheek.

CHAPTER X

I have spoken of these reminiscences as of a row of coloured beads, and I confess that as I continue to straighten out my chaplet I am rather proud of the comparison. The beads are all there, as I said–they slip along the string in their small smooth roundness. Geoffrey Dawling accepted as a gentleman the event his evening paper had proclaimed; in view of which I snatched a moment to nudge him a hint that he might offer Mrs. Meldrum his hand. He returned me a heavy head-shake, and I judged that marriage would henceforth strike him very much as the traffic of the street may strike some poor incurable at the window of an hospital. Circumstances arising at this time led to my making an absence from England, and circumstances already existing offered him a firm basis for similar action. He had after all the usual resource of a Briton–he could take to his boats, always drawn up in our background. He started on a journey round the globe, and I was left with nothing but my inference as to what might have happened. Later observation however only confirmed my belief that if at any time during the couple of months after Flora Saunt’s brilliant engagement he had made up, as they say, to the good lady of Folkestone, that good lady would not have pushed him over the cliff. Strange as she was to behold I knew of cases in which she had been obliged to administer that shove. I went to New York to paint a couple of portraits; but I found, once on the spot, that I had counted without Chicago, where I was invited to blot out this harsh discrimination by the production of some dozen. I spent a year in America and should probably have spent a second had I not been summoned back to England by alarming news from my mother. Her strength had failed, and as soon as I reached London I hurried down to Folkestone, arriving just at the moment to offer a welcome to some slight symptom of a rally. She had been much worse but was now a little better; and though I found nothing but satisfaction in having come to her I saw after a few hours that my London studio, where arrears of work had already met me, would be my place to await whatever might next occur. Yet before returning to town I called on Mrs. Meldrum, from whom I had not had a line, and my view of whom, with the adjacent objects, as I had left them, had been intercepted by a luxuriant foreground.