"She has just passed an hour with every one in the place!" Mrs. Meldrum
cried. "They've vital reasons, she says, for it's not coming out for a
month. Then it will be formally announced, but meanwhile her rejoicing
is wild. I daresay Mr. Dawling already knows and, as it's nearly seven
o'clock, may have jumped off London Bridge. But an effect of the talk I
had with him the other day was to make me, on receipt of my telegram,
feel it to be my duty to warn him in person against taking action, so to
call it, on the horrid certitude which I could see he carried away with
him. I had added somehow to that certitude. He told me what you had
told him you had seen in your shop."

Mrs. Meldrum, I perceived, had come to Welbeck Street on an errand
identical with my own--a circumstance indicating her rare sagacity,
inasmuch as her ground for undertaking it was a very different thing from
what Flora's wonderful visit had made of mine. I remarked to her that
what I had seen in the shop was sufficiently striking, but that I had
seen a great deal more that morning in my studio. "In short," I said,
"I've seen everything."

She was mystified. "Everything?"

"The poor creature is under the darkest of clouds. Oh she came to
triumph, but she remained to talk something in the nature of sense! She
put herself completely in my hands--she does me the honour to intimate
that of all her friends I'm the most disinterested. After she had
announced to me that Lord Iffield was utterly committed to her and that
for the present I was absolutely the only person in the secret, she
arrived at her real business. She had had a suspicion of me ever since
that day at Folkestone when I asked her for the truth about her eyes. The
truth is what you and I both guessed. She's in very bad danger."