d 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
of "Lohengrin," but the second was just beginning, and I gave myself up
to it with no more than a glance at the house. When it was over I
treated myself, with my glass, from my place in the stalls, to a general
survey of the boxes, making doubtless on their contents the reflections,
pointed by comparison, that are most familiar to the wanderer restored to
London. There was the common sprinkling of pretty women, but I suddenly
noted that one of these was far prettier than the others. This lady,
alone in one of the smaller receptacles of the grand tier and already the
aim of fifty tentative glasses, which she sustained with admirable
serenity, this single exquisite figure, placed in the quarter furthest
removed from my stall, was a person, I immediately felt, to cause one's
curiosity to linger. Dressed in white, with diamonds in her hair and
pearls on her neck, she had a pale radiance of beauty which even at that
distance made her a distinguished presence and, with the air that easily
attac