“Urge him to fly to the rescue; write out to him that there was another chance for him.”
“Well,” Mrs. Meldrum replied, “it was not my business to give you an opportunity.”
Again she hesitated and though it may have been only my fancy I thought she considerably reddened. At all events she laughed out. Then “I was afraid of it!” she very honestly answered.
“But doesn’t he know? Has he given no sign?”
“Every sign in life--he came straight back to her. He did everything to get her to listen to him; but she hasn’t the smallest idea of it.”
“Has he seen her as she is now?” I presently and just a trifle awkwardly inquired.
“Indeed he has, and borne it like a hero. He told me all about it.”
“How much you’ve all been through!” I ventured to ejaculate. “Then what has become of him?”
“He’s at home in Hampshire. He has got back his old place and I believe by this time his old sisters. It’s not half a bad little place.”
“Yet its attractions say nothing to Flora?”
“Oh, Flora’s by no means on her back!” my interlocutress laughed.
“She’s not on her back because she’s on yours. Have you got her for the rest of your life?”
Once more my hostess genially glared at me. “Did she tell you how much the Hammond Synges have kindly left her to live on? Not quite eighty pounds a year.”
“That’s a good deal, but it won’t pay the oculist. What was it that at last induced her to submit to him?”
“Her general collapse after that brute of an Iffield’s rupture. She cried her eyes out--she passed through a horror of black darkness. Then came a gleam of light, and the light appears to have broadened. She went into goggles as repentant Magdalens go into the Catholic Church.”
“_She_ thinks she will--that’s all I can tell you. There’s no doubt that when once she brought herself to accept her real remedy, as she calls it, she began to enjoy a relief that she had never known. That feeling, very new and in spite of what she pays for it most refreshing, has given her something to hold on by, begotten in her foolish little mind a belief that, as she says, she’s on the mend and that in the course of time, if she leads a tremendously healthy life, she’ll be able to take off her muzzle and become as dangerous again as ever. It keeps her going.”