a strange
sweet blankness, an expression I failed to give a meaning to until,
without delay, I felt on my arm, directed to it as if instantly to efface
the effect of her start, the grasp of the hand she had impulsively
snatched from me. It was the irrepressible question in this grasp that
stopped on my lips all sound of salutation. She had mistaken my entrance
for that of another person, a pair of lips without a moustache. She was
feeling me to see who I was! With the perception of this and of her not
seeing me I sat gaping at her and at the wild word that didn't come, the
right word to express or to disguise my dismay. What was the right word
to commemorate one's sudden discovery, at the very moment too at which
one had been most encouraged to count on better things, that one's dear
old friend had gone blind? Before the answer to this question dropped
upon me--and the moving moments, though few, seemed many--I heard, with
the sound of voices, the click of the attendant's key on the other side
of the door. Poor Flora heard also and on hearing, still with her hand
on my arm, brightened again as I had a minute since seen her brighten
across the house: she had the sense of the return of the person she had
taken me for--the person with the right pair of lips, as to whom I was
for that matter much more in the dark than she. I gasped, but my word
had come: if she had lost her sight it was in this very loss that she had
found again her beauty. I managed to speak while we were still alone,
before her companion had appeared. "You're lovelier at this day than you
have ever been in your life!" At the sound of my voice and that of the
opening of the door her impatience broke into audible joy. She sprang
up, recognising me, always holding me, and gleefully cried to a gentleman
who was arrested in the doorway by the sight of me: "He has come back, he
has come back, and you should have heard what he says of me!" The
gentleman was Geoffrey Dawling, and I thought it best to let him hear on
the spot. "How beautiful she is, my dear man--but how extraordinarily
beautiful! More beautiful at this hour than ever, ever before!"

It gave them almost equal pleasure and made Dawling blush to his eyes;
while this in turn produced, in spite of deepened astonishment, a blest
snap of the strain I had been struggling with. I wanted to embrace them
both, and while the opening bars of another scene rose from the orchestra
I almost did em