colour of quite other and not at all guessable thoughts, this directly
added to their splendour, gave the girl the sharpest impression she had
yet received of the uplifted, the unattainable plains of heaven, and yet
at the same time caused her to thrill with a sense of the high company
she did somehow keep. She was with the absent through her ladyship and
with her ladyship through the absent. The only pang--but it didn't
matter--was the proof in the admirable face, in the sightless
preoccupation of its possessor, that the latter hadn't a notion of her.
Her folly had gone to the point of half believing that the other party to
the affair must sometimes mention in Eaton Square the extraordinary
little person at the place from which he so often wired. Yet the
perception of her visitor's blankness actually helped this extraordinary
little person, the next instant, to take refuge in a reflexion that could
be as proud as it liked. "How little she knows, how little she knows!"
the girl cried to herself; for what did that show after all but that
Captain Everard's telegraphic confidant was Captain Everard's charming
secret? Our young friend's perusal of her ladyship's telegram was
literally prolonged by a momentary daze: what swam between her and the
words, making her see them as through rippled shallow sunshot water, was
the great, the perpetual flood of "How much _I_ know--how much _I_ know!"
This produced a delay in her catching that, on the face, these words
didn't give her what she wanted, though she was prompt enough with her
remembrance that her grasp was, half the time, just of what was _not_ on
the face. "Miss Dolman, Parade Lodge, Parade Terrace, Dover. Let him
instantly know right one, Hotel de France, Ostend. Make it seven nine
four nine six one. Wire me alternative Burfield's."

The girl slowly counted. Then he was at Ostend. This hooked on with so
sharp a click that, not to feel she was as quickly letting it all slip
from her, she had absolutely to hold it a minute longer and to do