the observation that as there was certainly a great deal I should have to say to our friend she had better not go in with me.  I looked at her again—­I had been keeping my eyes away from her—­but only to meet her magnified stare.  I greatly desired in truth to see Mrs. Meldrum alone, but there was something so grim in the girl’s trouble that I hesitated to fall in with this idea of dropping her.  Yet one couldn’t express a compassion without seeming to take for granted more trouble than there actually might have been.  I reflected that I must really figure to her as a fool, which was an entertainment I had never expected to give her.  It rolled over me there for the first time—­it has come back to me since—­that there is, wondrously, in very deep and even in very foolish misfortune a dignity still finer than in the most inveterate habit of being all right.  I couldn’t have to her the manner of treating it as a mere detail that I was face to face with a part of what, at our last meeting, we had had such a scene about; but while I was trying to think of some manner that I could have she said quite colourlessly, though somehow as if she might never see me again:  “Good-bye.  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 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?