to me in due course. The gravity of what might happen to a featherweight
became indeed with time and distance less appreciable, and I was not
without an impression that Mrs. Meldrum, whose sense of proportion was
not the least of her merits, had no idea of boring the world with the ups
and downs of her pensioner. The poor girl grew dusky and dim, a small
fitful memory, a regret tempered by the comfortable consciousness of how
kind Mrs. Meldrum would always be to her. I was professionally more
preoccupied than I had ever been, and I had swarms of pretty faces in my
eyes and a chorus of loud tones in my ears. Geoffrey Dawling had on his
return to England written me two or three letters: his last information
had been that he was going into the figures of rural illiteracy. I was
delighted to receive it and had no doubt that if he should go into
figures they would, as they are said to be able to prove anything, prove
at least that my advice was sound and that he had wasted time enough.
This quickened on my part another hope, a hope suggested by some
roundabout rumour--I forget how it reached me--that he was engaged to a
girl down in Hampshire. He turned out not to be, but I felt sure that if
only he went into figures deep enough he would become, among the girls
down in Hampshire or elsewhere, one of those numerous prizes of battle
whose defences are practically not on the scale of their provocations. I
nursed in short the thought that it was probably open to him to develop
as one of the types about whom, as the years go on, superficial critics
wonder without relief how they ever succeeded in dragging a bride to the
altar. He never alluded to Flora Saunt; and there was in his silence
about her, quite as in Mrs. Meldrum's, an element of instinctive tact, a
brief implication that if you didn't happen to have been in love with her
there was nothing to be said.

Within a week after my return to London I went to the opera, of which I
had always been much of a devotee. I arrived too late for the first act