of the wedded state.  Nothing of old had seemed wanting to her assurance, but I hadn’t then dreamed of the art with which she would wear that assurance as a married woman.  She had taken him when everything had failed; he had taken her when she herself had done so.  His embarrassed eyes confessed it all, confessed the deep peace he found in it.  They only didn’t tell me why he had not written to me, nor clear up as yet a minor obscurity.  Flora after a while again lifted the glass from the ledge of the box and elegantly swept the house with it.  Then, by the mere instinct of her grace, a motion but half conscious, she inclined her head into the void with the sketch of a salute, producing, I could see, a perfect imitation of response to some homage.  Dawling and I looked at each other again; the tears came into his eyes.  She was playing at perfection still, and her misfortune only simplified the process.

I recognised that this was as near as I should ever come, certainly as I should come that night, to pressing on her misfortune.  Neither of us would name it more than we were doing then, and Flora would never name it at all.  Little by little I saw that what had occurred was, strange as it might appear, the best thing for her happiness.  The question was now only of her beauty and her being seen and marvelled at; with Dawling to do for her everything in life her activity was limited to that.  Such an activity was all within her scope; it asked nothing of her that she couldn’t splendidly give.  As from time to time in our delicate communion she turned her face to me with the parody of a look I lost none of the signs of its strange new glory.  The expression of the eyes was a rub of pastel from a master’s thumb; the whole head, stamped with a sort of showy suffering, had gained a fineness from what she had passed through.  Yes, Flora was settled for life—­nothing could hurt her further.  I foresaw the particular praise she would mostly incur—­she would be invariably “interesting.”  She would charm with her pathos more even than she had charmed with her pleasure.  For herself above all she was fixed for ever, rescued from all change and ransomed from all doubt.  Her old certainties, her old vanities were justified and sanctified, and in the darkness that had closed upon her one object remained clear.  That object, as unfading as a mosaic mask, was fortunately the loveliest she could possibly look upon.  The greatest blessing of all was of course that Dawling thought so.  Her future was ruled with the straightest line, and so for that matter was his.  There were two facts to which before I left my friends I gave time to sink into my spirit.  One was that he had changed by some process as effective as Flora’s change, had been simplified somehow into service as she had been simplified into success.  He was such a picture of inspired intervention as I had never yet conceived:  he would exist henceforth for the sole purpose of rendering