ad
not had a line, and my view of whom, with the adjacent objects, as I had
left them, had been intercepted by a luxuriant foreground.

Before I had gained her house I met her, as I supposed, coming toward me
across the down, greeting me from afar with the familiar twinkle of her
great vitreous badge; and as it was late in the autumn and the esplanade
was a blank I was free to acknowledge this signal by cutting a caper
on the grass. My enthusiasm dropped indeed the next moment, for it had
taken me but a few seconds to perceive that the person thus assaulted
had by no means the figure of my military friend. I felt a shock much
greater than any I should have thought possible as on this person's
drawing near I identified her as poor little Flora Saunt. At what moment
Flora had recognised me belonged to an order of mysteries over which, it
quickly came home to me, one would never linger again: I could intensely
reflect that once we were face to face it chiefly mattered that I should
succeed in looking still more intensely unastonished. All I saw at first
was the big gold bar crossing each of her lenses, over which something
convex and grotesque, like the eyes of a large insect, something that
now represented her whole personality, seemed, as out of the orifice
of a prison, to strain forward and press. The face had shrunk away: it
looked smaller, appeared even to look plain; it was at all events, so
far as the effect on a spectator was concerned, wholly sacrificed to
this huge apparatus of sight. There was no smile in it, and she made no
motion to take my offered hand.

"I had no idea you were down here!" I exclaimed; and I wondered whether
she didn't know me at all or knew me only by my voice.

"You thought I was Mrs. Meldrum," she very quietly remarked.

It was the quietness itself that made me feel the necessity of an answer
almost violently gay. "Oh yes," I laughed, "you have a tremendous deal
in common with Mrs. Meldrum! I've just returned to England after a long
absence and I'm on my way to see her. Won't you come with me?" It struck
me that her old reason for keeping clear of our friend was well disposed
of now.

"I've just left her; I'm staying with her." She stood solemnly fixing
me with her goggles. "Would you like to paint me _now?_" she asked. She
seemed to speak, with intense gravity, from behind a mask or a cage.

There was nothing to do but to treat the question with the same
exuberance. "It would be a f