CHAPTER IX


She left me, after she had been introduced, in no suspense about her
present motive; she was on the contrary in a visible fever to enlighten
me; but I promptly learned that for the alarm with which she pitiably
panted our young man was not accountable. She had but one thought in the
world, and that thought was for Lord Iffield. I had the strangest
saddest scene with her, and if it did me no other good it at least made
me at last completely understand why insidiously, from the first, she had
struck me as a creature of tragedy. In showing me the whole of her folly
it lifted the curtain of her misery. I don't know how much she meant to
tell me when she came--I think she had had plans of elaborate
misrepresentation; at any rate she found it at the end of ten minutes the
simplest way to break down and sob, to be wretched and true. When she
had once begun to let herself go the movement took her off her feet; the
relief of it was like the cessation of a cramp. She shared in a word her
long secret, she shifted her sharp pain. She brought, I confess, tears
to my own eyes, tears of helpless tenderness for her helpless poverty.
Her visit however was not quite so memorable in itself as in some of its
consequences, the most immediate of which was that I went that afternoon
to see Geoffrey Dawling, who had in those days rooms in Welbeck Street,
where I presented myself at an hour late enough to warrant the
supposition that he might have come in. He had not come in, but he was
expected, and I was invited to enter and wait for him: a lady, I was
informed, was already in his sitting-room. I hesitated, a little at a
loss: it had wildly coursed through my brain that the lady was perhaps
Flora Saunt. But when I asked if she were young and remarkably pretty I