ehow as if she might never see me again: "Goodbye.
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 very 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. It acts directly on
the state of the particular organ. So I'm going three miles."

I grinned at her from the doorstep while Mrs. Meldrum's maid stood there
to admit me. "Oh, I'm so glad," I said, looking at her as she paced away
with the pretty flutter she had kept and remembering the day when, while
she rejoined Lord Iffield, I had indulged in the same observation. Her
air of assurance was on this occasion not less than it had been on that;
but I recalled that she had then struck me as marching off to her doom.
Was she really now marching away from it?

XI

As soon as I saw Mrs. Meldrum I broke out to her. "Is there anything in
it? _Is_ her general health--?"

Mrs. Meldrum interrupted me with her great amused blare. "You've already
seen her and she has told you her wondrous tale? What's 'in it' is what
has been in everything she has ever done--the most comical, tragical
belief in herself. She thinks she's doing a 'cure.'"

"And what does her husband think?"

"Her husband? What husband?"

"Hasn't she then married Lord Iffield?"

"_Vous-en-etes la?_" cried my hostess. "He behaved like a regular
beast."

"How should I know? You never wrote to me."

Mrs. Meldrum hesitated, covering me wit