"All alone?"

She looked round the great bleak cliff-top. "With whom should I go?
Besides I like to be alone--for the present."

This gave me the glimmer of a vision that she regarded her disfigurement
as temporary, and the confidence came to me that she would never, for her
happiness, cease to be a creature of illusions. It enabled me to
exclaim, smiling brightly and feeling indeed idiotic: "Oh I shall see you
again! But I hope you'll have a very pleasant walk."

"All my walks are pleasant, thank you--they do me such a lot of good."
She was as quiet as a mouse, and her words seemed to me stupendous in
their wisdom. "I take several a day," she continued. She might have
been an ancient woman responding with humility at the church door to the
patronage of the parson. "The more I take the better I feel. I'm
ordered by the doctors to keep all the while in the air and go in for
plenty of exercise. It keeps up my general health, you know, and if that
goes on improving as it has lately done everything will soon be all
right. All that was the matter with me before--and always; it was too
reckless!--was that I neglected my general health. It acts directly on
the state of the particular organ. So I'm going three miles."

I grinned at her from the doorstep while Mrs. Meldrum's maid stood there
to admit me. "Oh I'm so glad," I said, looking at her as she paced away
with the pretty flutter she had kept and remembering the day when, while
she rejoined Lord Iffield, I had indulged in the same observation. Her
air of assurance was on this occasion not less than it had been on that;
but I recalled that she had then struck me as marching off to her doom.