"He's at home in Hampshire. He has got back his old place and I believe
by this time his old sisters. It's not half a bad little place."

"Yet its attractions say nothing to Flora?"

"Oh Flora's by no means on her back!" my fried declared.

"She's not on her back because she's on yours. Have you got her for the
rest of your life?"

Once more Mrs. Meldrum genially glared. "Did she tell you how much the
Hammond Synges have kindly left her to live on? Not quite eighty pounds
a year."

"That's a good deal, but it won't pay the oculist. What was it that at
last induced her to submit to him?"

"Her general collapse after that brute of an Iffield's rupture. She
cried her eyes out--she passed through a horror of black darkness. Then
came a gleam of light, and the light appears to have broadened. She went
into goggles as repentant Magdalens go into the Catholic church."

"In spite of which you don't think she'll be saved?"

"_She_ thinks she will--that's all I can tell you. There's no doubt that
when once she brought herself to accept her real remedy, as she calls it,
she began to enjoy a relief that she had never known. That feeling, very
new and in spite of what she pays for it most refreshing, has given her
something to hold on by, begotten in her foolish little mind a belief
that, as she says, she's on the mend and that in the course of time, if