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Then abruptly he broke out: "He's going to marry her." I was surprised. "You already know?" He had had in his hand an evening newspaper; he tossed it down on the table. "It's in that." "Published already?" I was still more surprised. "Oh, Flora can't keep a secret!" Mrs. Meldrum humorously declared. She went up to poor Dawling and laid a motherly hand upon him.
A few days later I again heard Dawling on my stairs, and even before he passed my threshold I knew he had something to tell me. "I've been down to Folkestone it was necessary I should see her!" I forget whether he had come straight from the station; he was at any rate out of breath with his news, which it took me however a minute to interpret. "You mean that you've been with Mrs. Mel-drum?"
In the act of passing, the gentleman, still standing, pointed at it with an elegant gold-headed cane which he held in his hand. "Are you come after this, Abraham Dawling?" says he, and thereat his countenance broke into as evil, malignant a grin as ever Barnaby True saw in all of his life. The other did not immediately reply so much as a single word, but sat as still as any stone.
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 a 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.
"Oh, who knows?" I rejoined with small sincerity. "I don't suppose Iffield is absolutely a brute." "I would take her with leather blinders, like a shying mare!" cried Geoffrey Dawling. I had an impression that Iffield wouldn't, but I didn't communicate it, for I wanted to pacify my friend, whom I had discomposed too much for the purposes of my sitting.
Geoffrey Dawling accepted as a gentleman the event his evening paper had proclaimed; in view of which I snatched a moment to nudge him a hint that he might offer Mrs. Meldrum his hand. He returned me a heavy head-shake, and I judged that marriage would henceforth strike him very much as the traffic of the street may strike some poor incurable at the window of an hospital.
She lost herself in these reminiscences, the moral of which was that poor Mr. Dawling was only one of a million. When therefore the next autumn she flourished into my studio with her odd companion at her heels her first care was to make clear to me that if he was now in servitude it wasn't because she had run after him.
It seems to me highly immoral, one's participation in her fraud; but there's no doubt that she must be married: I don't know what I don't see behind it! Therefore," I wound up, "Dawling must keep his hands off." Mrs. Meldrum had held her breath; she exhaled a long moan. "Well, that's exactly what I came here to tell him." "Then here he is." Our unconscious host had just opened the door.
He principally after a while made me feel and this was my second lesson that, good-natured as he was, my being there to see it all oppressed him; so that by the time the act ended I recognised that I too had filled out my hour. Dawling remembered things; I think he caught in my very face the irony of old judgments: they made him thresh about in his chair.
Don't you remember poor, pale Winnie, the maid who used to take us on our walks all the summer at Dawling; how she used to pluck the leaves from the flowers, like Faust's Marguerite, saying, "He loves me a little passionately, not at all." Now if I were loved passionately, I might love a little; and if loved a little it should be not at all.
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