h what poor Flora called the
particular organ. "No, I didn't write to you; and I abstained on
purpose. If I didn't I thought you mightn't, over there, hear what
had happened. If you should hear I was afraid you would stir up Mr.
Dawling."

"Stir him up?"

"Urge him to fly to the rescue; write out to him that there was another
chance for him."

"I wouldn't have done it," I said.

"Well," Mrs. Meldrum replied, "it was not my business to give you an
opportunity."

"In short you were afraid of it."

Again she hesitated and though it may have been only my fancy I thought
she considerably reddened. At all events she laughed out. Then "I was
afraid of it!" she very honestly answered.

"But doesn't he know? Has he given no sign?"

"Every sign in life--he came straight back to her. He did everything to
get her to listen to him; but she hasn't the smallest idea of it."

"Has he seen her as she is now?" I presently and just a trifle awkwardly
inquired.

"Indeed he has, and borne it like a hero. He told me all about it."

"How much you've all been through!" I ventured to ejaculate. "Then what
has become of him?"

"He's at home in Hampshire. He has got back his old place and I believe
by this 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 interlocutress laughed.

"She's not on her back because she's on yours. Have you got her for the
rest of your life?"

Once more my hostess genially glared at me. "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."

"Yet 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