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
she leads a tremendously healthy life, she'll be able to take off her
muzzle and become as dangerous again as ever. It keeps her going."

"And what keeps you? You're good until the parties begin again."

"Oh she doesn't object to me now!" smiled Mrs. Meldrum. "I'm going to
take her abroad; we shall be a pretty pair." I was struck with this
energy and after a moment I enquired the reason of it. "It's to divert
her mind," my friend replied, reddening again a little, I thought. "We
shall go next week: I've only waited to see how your mother would be
before starting." I expressed to her hereupon my sense of her
extraordinary merit and also that of the inconceivability of Flora's
fancying herself still in a situation not to jump at the chance of
marrying a man like Dawling. "She says he's too ugly; she says he's too
dreary; she says in fact he's 'nobody,'" Mrs. Meldrum pursued. "She says
above all that he's not 'her own sort.' She doesn't deny that he's good,
but she finds him impossibly ridiculous. He's quite the last person she
would ever dream of." I was almost disposed on hearing this to protest
that if the girl had so little prop