ot some moments longer by the simple inability to cease looking
at her.

She had been from the first of my seeing her practically motionless,
leaning back in her chair with a kind of thoughtful grace and with her
eyes vaguely directed, as it seemed to me, to one of the boxes on my
side of the house and consequently over my head and out of my sight. The
only movement she made for some time was to finger with an ungloved
hand and as if with the habit of fondness the row of pearls on her neck,
which my glass showed me to be large and splendid. Her diamonds and
pearls, in her solitude, mystified me, making me, as she had had no such
brave jewels in the days of the Hammond Synges, wonder what undreamt-of
improvement had taken place in her fortunes. The ghost of a question
hovered there a moment: could anything so prodigious have happened as
that on her tested and proved amendment Lord Iffield had taken her back?
This could not have occurred without my hearing of it; and moreover if
she had become a person of such fashion where was the little court one
would naturally see at her elbow? Her isolation was puzzling, though it
could easily suggest that she was but momentarily alone. If she had come
with Mrs. Mel-drum that lady would have taken advantage of the interval
to pay a visit to some other box--doubtless the box at which Flora had
just been looking. Mrs. Meldrum didn't account for the jewels, but the
refreshment of Flora's beauty accounted for anything. She presently
moved her eyes over the house, and I felt them brush me again like the
wings of a dove. I don't know what quick pleasure flickered into the
hope that she would at last see me. She did see me: she suddenly bent
forward to take up the little double-barrelled ivory glass that rested
on the edge of the box and, to all appearance, fix me with it. I smiled
from my place straight up at the searching lenses, and after an instant
she dropped them and smiled as straight back at me. Oh, her smile: it
was her old smile, her young smile, her peculiar smile made perfect! I
instantly left my stall and hurried off for a nearer view of it; quite
flushed, I remember, as I went, with the annoyance of having happened to
think of the idiotic way I had tried to paint her. Poor Iffield with his
sample of that error, and still poorer Dawling in particular with his!
I hadn't touched her, I was professionally humiliated, and as the
attendant in the lobby opened her box for me I felt th