obscure and dumb was no Flora at all. At Mrs. Meldrum's door
she turned off with the observation that as there was certainly a great
deal I should have to say to our friend she had better not go in with me.
I looked at her again--I had been keeping my eyes away from her--but only
to meet her magnified stare. I greatly desired in truth to see Mrs.
Meldrum alone, but there was something so grim in the girl's trouble that
I hesitated to fall in with this idea of dropping her. Yet one couldn't
express a compassion without seeming to take for granted more trouble
than there actually might have been. I reflected that I must really
figure to her as a fool, which was an entertainment I had never expected
to give her. It rolled over me there for the first time--it has come
back to me since--that there is, wondrously, in very deep and even in
very foolish misfortune a dignity still finer than in the most inveterate
habit of being all right. I couldn't have to her the manner of treating
it as a mere detail that I was face to face with a part of what, at our
last meeting, we had had such a scene about; but while I was trying to
think of some manner that I _could_ have she said quite colourlessly,
though somehow as if she might never see me again: "Good-bye. I'm going
to take my walk."

"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.