small things and to believe that grave tidings, should there be any, would come to me in due course.  The gravity of what might happen to a featherweight became indeed with time and distance less appreciable, and I was not without an impression that Mrs. Meldrum, whose sense of proportion was not the least of her merits, had no idea of boring the world with the ups and downs of her pensioner.  The poor girl grew dusky and dim, a small fitful memory, a regret tempered by the comfortable consciousness of how kind Mrs. Meldrum would always be to her.  I was professionally more preoccupied than I had ever been, and I had swarms of pretty faces in my eyes and a chorus of loud tones in my ears.  Geoffrey Dawling had on his return to England written me two or three letters:  his last information had been that he was going into the figures of rural illiteracy.  I was delighted to receive it and had no doubt that if he should go into figures they would, as they are said to be able to prove anything, prove at least that my advice was sound and that he had wasted time enough.  This quickened on my part another hope, a hope suggested by some roundabout rumour—­I forget how it reached me—­that he was engaged to a girl down in Hampshire.  He turned out not to be, but I felt sure that if only he went into figures deep enough he would become, among the girls down in Hampshire or elsewhere, one of those numerous prizes of battle whose defences are practically not on the scale of their provocations.  I nursed in short the thought that it was probably open to him to develop as one of the types about whom, as the years go on, superficial critics wonder without relief how they ever succeeded in dragging a bride to the altar.  He never alluded to Flora Saunt; and there was in his silence about her, quite as in Mrs. Meldrum’s, an element of instinctive tact, a brief implication that if you didn’t happen to have been in love with her there was nothing to be said.

Within a week after my return to London I went to the opera, of which I had always been much of a devotee.  I arrived too late for the first act of “Lohengrin,” but the second was just beginning, and I gave myself up to it with no more than a glance at the house.  When it was over I treated myself, with my glass, from my place in the stalls, to a general survey of the boxes, making doubtless on their contents the reflections, pointed by comparison, that are most familiar to the wanderer restored to London.  There was the common sprinkling of pretty women, but I suddenly noted that one of these was far prettier than the others.  This lady, alone in one of the smaller receptacles of the grand tier and already the aim of fifty tentative glasses, which she sustained with admirable serenity, this single exquisite figure, placed in the quarter furthest removed from my stall, was a person, I immediately felt, to cause one’s curiosity to linger.  Dressed in white, with diamonds in her hair and pearls