the moving moments, though few, seemed many—­I heard, with the sound of voices, the click of the attendant’s key on the other side of the door.  Poor Flora heard also and on hearing, still with her hand on my arm, brightened again as I had a minute since seen her brighten across the house:  she had the sense of the return of the person she had taken me for—­the person with the right pair of lips, as to whom I was for that matter much more in the dark than she.  I gasped, but my word had come:  if she had lost her sight it was in this very loss that she had found again her beauty.  I managed to speak while we were still alone, before her companion had appeared.  “You’re lovelier at this day than you have ever been in your life!” At the sound of my voice and that of the opening of the door her impatience broke into audible joy.  She sprang up, recognising me, always holding me, and gleefully cried to a gentleman who was arrested in the doorway by the sight of me:  “He has come back, he has come back, and you should have heard what he says of me!” The gentleman was Geoffrey Dawling, and I thought it best to let him hear on the spot.  “How beautiful she is, my dear man—­but how extraordinarily beautiful!  More beautiful at this hour than ever, ever before!”

It gave them almost equal pleasure and made Dawling blush to his eyes; while this in turn produced, in spite of deepened astonishment, a blest snap of the strain I had been struggling with.  I wanted to embrace them both, and while the opening bars of another scene rose from the orchestra I almost did embrace Dawling, whose first emotion on beholding me had visibly and ever so oddly been a consciousness of guilt.  I had caught him somehow in the act, though that was as yet all I knew; but by the time we sank noiselessly into our chairs again—­for the music was supreme, Wagner passed first—­my demonstration ought pretty well to have given him the limit of the criticism he had to fear.  I myself indeed, while the opera blazed, was only too afraid he might divine in our silent closeness the very moral of my optimism, which was simply the comfort I had gathered from seeing that if our companion’s beauty lived again her vanity partook of its life.  I had hit on the right note—­that was what eased me off:  it drew all pain for the next half-hour from the sense of the deep darkness in which the stricken woman sat.  If the music, in that darkness, happily soared and swelled for her, it beat its wings in unison with those of a gratified passion.  A great deal came and went between us without profaning the occasion, so that I could feel at the end of twenty minutes as if I knew almost everything he might in kindness have to tell me; knew even why Flora, while I stared at her from the stalls, had misled me by the use of ivory and crystal and by appearing to recognise me and smile.  She leaned back in her chair in luxurious ease:  I had from the first become aware that the way she fingered her pearls was a sharp image