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Before I had gained her house I met her, as I supposed, coming toward me across the down, greeting me from afar with the familiar twinkle of her great vitreous badge; and as it was late in the autumn and the esplanade a blank I was free to acknowledge this signal by cutting a caper on the grass. My enthusiasm dropped indeed the next moment, for I had seen in a few more seconds that the person thus assaulted had by no means the figure of my military friend. I felt a shock much greater than any I should have thought possible when on this person’s drawing near I knew her for poor little Flora Saunt. At what moment she had recognised me belonged to an order of mysteries over which, it quickly came home to me, one would never linger again: once we were face to face it so chiefly mattered that I should succeed in looking entirely unastonished. All I at first saw was the big gold bar crossing each of her lenses, over which something convex and grotesque, like the eyes of a large insect, something that now represented her whole personality, seemed, as out of the orifice of a prison, to strain forward and press. The face had shrunk away: it looked smaller, appeared even to look plain; it was at all events, so far as the effect on a spectator was concerned, wholly sacrificed to this huge apparatus of sight. There was no smile in it, and she made no motion to take my offered hand.

“I had no idea you were down here!” I said and I wondered whether she didn’t know me at all or knew me only by my voice.

“You thought I was Mrs. Meldrum,” she ever so quietly answered.

It was just this low pitch that made me protest with laughter. “Oh yes, you have a tremendous deal in common with Mrs. Meldrum! I’ve just returned to England after a long absence and I’m on my way to see her. Won’t you come with me?” It struck me that her old reason for keeping clear of our friend was well disposed of now.

“I’ve just left her. I’m staying with her.” She stood solemnly fixing me with her goggles. “Would you like to paint me now?” she asked. She seemed to speak, with intense gravity, from behind a mask or a cage.

There was nothing to do but treat the question still with high spirits. “It would be a fascinating little artistic problem!” That something was wrong it wasn’t difficult to see, but a good deal more than met the eye might be presumed to be wrong if Flora was under Mrs. Meldrum’s roof. I hadn’t for a year had much time to think of her, but my imagination had had ground for lodging her in more gilded halls. One of the last things I had heard before leaving England was that in commemoration of the new relationship she had gone to stay with Lady Considine. This had made me take everything else for granted, and the noisy American world had deafened my care to possible contradictions. Her spectacles were at present a direct contradiction; they seemed a negation not only of new relationships but of every old one as well. I remember nevertheless that when after a moment she walked beside me on the grass I found myself nervously hoping she wouldn’t as yet at any rate tell me anything very dreadful; so that to stave off this danger I harried her with questions about Mrs. Meldrum and, without waiting for replies, became profuse on the subject of my own doings. My companion was finely silent, and I felt both as if she were watching my nervousness with a sort of sinister irony and as if I were talking to some different and strange person. Flora plain and obscure and dumb was no Flora at all. At Mrs. Meldrum’s door she turned off with the observation that as there was certainly a great deal I should have to say to our friend she had better not go in with me. I looked at her again–I had been keeping my eyes away from her–but only to meet her magnified stare. I greatly desired in truth to see Mrs. Meldrum alone, but there was something so grim in the girl’s trouble that I hesitated to fall in with this idea of dropping her. Yet one couldn’t express a compassion without seeming to take for granted more trouble than there actually might have been. I reflected that I must really figure to her as a fool, which was an entertainment I had never expected to give her. It rolled over me there for the first time–it has come back to me since–that there is, wondrously, in very deep and even in very foolish misfortune a dignity still finer than in the most inveterate habit of being all right. I couldn’t have to her the manner of treating it as a mere detail that I was face to face with a part of what, at our last meeting, we had had such a scene about; but while I was trying to think of some manner that I COULD have she said quite colourlessly, though somehow as if she might never see me again: “Good-bye. I’m going to take my walk.”