gave me a chance to ask her if it would be her idea to present the picture, should I finish it, to the young man in the knickerbockers. Her lips, at this, parted in a stare; her eyes darkened to the purple of one of the shadow-patches on the sea. She showed the face, for the passing instant, of some splendid tragic mask, and I remembered, for the inconsequence of it, what Mrs. Meldrum had said about her sight. I had derived from this lady worrying impulse to catechise her, but that did n't seem exactly kind; so I substituted another question, inquired who the pretty young man in knickerbockers might happen to be.

"Oh, a gentleman I met at Boulogne. He has come over to see me." After a moment she added, "He's Lord Iffield."

I had never heard of Lord Iffield, but her mention of his having been at Boulogne helped me to give him a niche. Mrs. Meldrum had incidentally thrown a certain light on the manners of Mrs. Floyd-Taylor, Flora's recent hostess in that charming town, a lady who, it appeared, had a special vocation for directing the leisure of rich young men. She had always one or other in hand, and she had perhaps magnanimously diverted some of his lordship's spare hours to the use of the rare creature on the opposite coast. I had a vague idea that Boulogne was not a resort of the aristocracy; at the same time there might very well have been, even for one of the darlings of fortune, a strong attraction there. I could perfectly understand, in any case, that such a darling should be drawn to Folkestone by Flora Saunt. But it was not, in truth, of these things I was thinking; what was uppermost in my mind was a matter which, though it had no sort of congruity, insisted just then on coming out.

"Is it true, Miss Saunt," I suddenly demanded, "that you 're so unfortunate as to have had some warning about your eyes?"

"If

I was startled by the effect of my words; the girl threw back her head, changing color from brow to chin. "True? Who in the world says so?" I repented, in a flash, of my question; the way she took it made it seem cruel, and I saw that my mother looked at me in some surprise. I took care, in answer to Flora's challenge, not to incriminate Mrs. Meldrum. I answered that the rumor had reached me only in the vaguest form, and that if I had been moved to put it to the test my very real interest in her must be held responsible. Her blush died away, but a pair of still prettier tears glistened in its track. you ever hear such a thing said again, you can say it's a horrid lie! " I had brought on a commotion deeper than any I was prepared for; but it was explained in some degree by the next words she uttered: "I'm happy to say there's nothing the matter with any part of my body; not the least little. thing!" She spoke with her habitual complacency, with triumphant assurance; she smiled again, and I could see that she was already sorry she had shown herself too disconcerted. She turned it off with a laugh. "I've good eyes, good teeth, a good digestion, and a good temper. I'm sound of wind and limb!" Nothing could have been more characteristic than her blush and her tears, nothing less acceptable to her than to be thought not perfect in every particular. She could n't submit to the imputation of a flaw. of a flaw. I expressed my delight in what she told me, and assured her I should always do battle for her; and as if to rejoin her companions she got up from her place on my mother's toes. The young men presented their backs to us; they were leaning on the rail of the cliff. Our incident had produced a certain awkwardness, and, while I was thinking of what next to say, she exclaimed irrelevantly, "Don't you know? He'll be Lord Considine." At that moment the youth marked for this high destiny

turned round, and she went on, to my mother: "I'll introduce him to you, he's charming." She signed to him, with her parasol, to approach; the movement struck me as taking everything for granted. I had heard of Lord Considine, and if I had not been able to place Lord Iffield it was because I did n't know the name of his eldest son. The young man made no response to Miss Saunt's appeal; he only stared a moment, and then, on her repeating it, quietly turned his back. She was an odd creature she did n't blush at this; she only said to my mother apologetically, but with the frankest, sweetest amusement, "You don't mind, do you? He's a monster of shyness!" It was as if she were sorry for every one, - for Lord Iffield, the victim of a complaint so painful, and for my mother, the object of a trifling incivility. "I'm sure I don't want him!" said my mother; but Flora added some remark about the rebuke she would give him for slighting us.

She would never explain anything by any failure of her own power. There rolled over me, while she took leave of us and floated back to her friends, a wave of tenderness, superstitious and silly. I seemed somehow to see her go forth to her fate; and yet what should fill out this orb of a high destiny if not such beauty and such joy? I had a dim idea that Lord Considine was a great proprietor, and though there mingled with it a faint impression that I should n't like his son, the result of the two images was a whimsical prayer that the girl might n't miss her possible fortune.

IV.

One day in the course of the following June there was ushered into my studio a gentleman whom I had not yet seen, but with whom I had been, very briefly, in correspondence. A letter from him, some days before, had expressed to me

his regret on learning that my "splendid portrait" of Miss Flora Louisa Saunt, whose full name, by her own wish, figured in the catalogue of the exhibition of the Academy, had found a purchaser before the close of the private view. He took the liberty of inquiring whether I might have at his disposal some other memorial of the same lovely head, some preliminary sketch, some study for the picture. I had replied that I had indeed painted Miss Saunt more than once, and that, if he were interested in my work, I should be happy to show him what I had done. Mr. Geoffrey Dawling, the person thus introduced to me, stumbled into my room with awkward movements and equivocal sounds,- a long, lean, confused, confusing young man, with a bad complexion and large, prominent teeth. He bore in its most indelible pressure the postmark, as it were, of Oxford, and as soon as he opened his mouth I perceived, in addition to a remarkable revelation of gums, that the text of the queer communication matched the registered envelope. He was full of refinements and angles and of a kind of generalized pedantry. Of his unconscious drollery his dress freely partook; it seemed, from the gold ring into which his red necktie was passed to the square toe-caps of his boots, to conform, with a high sense of modernness, to the fashion before the last. There were moments when his overdone urbanity, all suggestive stammers and interrogative quavers, made him scarcely intelligible; but I felt him to be a gentleman, and I liked the honesty of his errand and the expression of his good green eyes.

As a worshiper at the shrine of beauty, however, he needed explaining, especially when I found he had no acquaintance with my brilliant model; had merely, on the evidence of my picture, taken, as he said, a tremendous fancy to her face. I ought doubtless to have been humiliated by the simplicity of his judg ment of it, a judgment for which the

treatment was lost in the subject, quite leaving out the element of art. He was like the innocent reader for whom the story is "really true" and the author a negligible quantity. He had come to me only because he wanted to purchase, and I remember being so amused at his attitude, which I had never seen equally marked in a person of education, that I asked him why, for the sort of enjoyment he desired, it would n't be more to the point to deal directly with the lady. He stared and blushed at this; I could see the idea frightened him. He was an extraordinary case, personally so modest that I could see it had never occurred to him. He had fallen in love with a painted sign, and seemed content just to dream of what it stood for. He was the young prince in the legend or the comedy who loses his heart to the miniature of the outland princess. Until I knew him better this puzzled me much, the link was so missing between his sensibility and his type. He was of course bewildered by my sketches, which implied in the beholder some sense of intention and quality; but for one of them, a comparative failure, he ended by conceiving a preference so arbitrary and so lively that, taking no second look at the others, he expressed the wish to possess it, and fell into the extremity of confusion over the question of the price. I simplified that problem, and he went off without having asked me a direct question about Miss Saunt, but with his acquisition under his arm. His delicacy was such that he evidently considered his rights to be limited : he had acquired none at all in regard to the original of the picture. There were others for I was curious about him - that I wanted him to feel I conceded: I should have been glad of his carrying away a sense of ground left for coming back. To insure this I had probably only to invite him, and I perfectly recall the impulse that made me forbear. It operated suddenly, from within, while he hung about

the door, and in spite of the diffident appeal that blinked in his ugly smile. If he was smitten with Flora's ghost, what might n't be the direct force of the luminary that could cast such a shadow? This source of radiance, flooding my poor place, might very well happen to be present the next time he should turn up. The idea was sharp within me that there were complications it was no mission of mine to bring about. If they were to occur, they might occur by a logic of their own.

Let me say at once that they did occur, and that I perhaps, after all, had something to do with it. If Mr. Dawling had departed without a fresh appointment, he was to reappear six months later under protection no less adequate than that of our young lady herself. I had seen her repeatedly for months: she had grown to regard my studio as the very shrine of her loveliness. This attribute was frankly there the object of interest; in other places there were occasionally other objects. The freedom of her manners continued to be stupefying: there was nothing so extraordinary save the absence, in connection with it, of any catastrophe. She was kept innocent by her egotism, but she was helped also, though she had now put off her mourning, by the attitude of the lone orphan who had to be a law unto herself. It was as a lone orphan that she came and went, as a lone orphan that she was the centre of a crush. The neglect of the Hammond-Synges gave relief to this character, and she paid them handsomely to be shocking. Lord Iffield had gone to India to shoot tigers, but he returned in time for the private view: it was he who had snapped up, as Flora called it, the thing at the Academy. My hope for the girl's future had slipped ignominiously off his back, but after his purchase of the portrait I tried to cultivate a new faith. The girl's own faith was wonderful; it could n't, however, be contagious, with so visible a

weakness in her sense of what painters call values. Her colors were laid on like blankets on a cold night. How indeed could a person speak the truth who was always posturing and bragging? She was after all vulgar enough, and by the time I had mastered her profile and could almost do it, in a single line, with my eyes shut, I was decidedly tired of her. There grew to be something silly in the smoothness of that silhouette. One moved with her, moreover, among phenomena mismated and unrelated; nothing in her talk ever matched with anything out of it. Lord Iffield was dying of love for her, but his family was leading him a life. His mother, horrid woman, had told some one that she would rather he should be swallowed by a tiger than marry a girl not absolutely one of themselves. He had given his young friend unmistakable signs, but he was lying low, gaining time: it was in his father's power to be, both in personal and in pecuniary ways, excessively nasty to him. His father would n't last forever,- quite the contrary; and he knew how perfectly, in spite of her youth, her beauty, and the swarm of her admirers, some of them positively threatening in their passion, he could trust her to hold out. There were richer, cleverer men, there were greater personages, too, but she liked her "little viscount" just as he was, and liked to think that, bullied and persecuted, he had her there so luxuriously to rest upon. She came back to me with tale upon tale, and it all might be or might n't; I never met my pretty model in the world, - she moved, it appeared, in exalted circles, and could only admire, in her wealth of illustration, the grandeur of her life and the freedom of her hand.

I had on the first opportunity spoken to her of Geoffrey Dawling, and she had listened to my story so far as she had the art of such patience, asking me indeed more questions about him than I could answer; then she had capped my

anecdote with others much more striking, revelations of effects produced in the most extraordinary quarters: on people who had followed her into railway carriages; guards and porters even who had literally stuck there; others who had spoken to her in shops and hung about her house-door; cabmen, upon her honor, in London, who, to gaze their fill at her, had found excuses to thrust their petrifaction through the very glasses of four-wheelers. 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 was n't because she had run after him. Dawling hilariously explained that when one wished very much to get anything one usually ended by doing so, a proposi tion which led me wholly to dissent, and our young lady to asseverate that she had not in the least wished to get Mr. Dawling. She might not have wished to get him, but she wished to show him, and I seemed to read that if she could treat him as a trophy her affairs were rather at the ebb. True there always hung from her belt a promiscuous fringe of scalps. Much, at any rate, would have come and gone since our separation in July. She had spent four months abroad, where, on Swiss and Italian lakes, in German cities, in Paris, many accidents might have happened.

V.

I had been again with my mother, but, except Mrs. Meldrum and the gleam of France, had not found at Folkestone my old objects of interest. Mrs. Meldrum, much edified by my report of the performances, as she called them, in my studio, had told me that, to her knowledge, Flora would soon be on the straw:

she had cut from her capital such fine fat slices that there was almost nothing more left to swallow. Perched on her breezy cliff, the good lady dazzled me, as usual, by her universal light: she knew so much more about everything and every one than I could ever squeeze out of my color-tubes. She knew that Flora was acting on system, and absolutely declined to be interfered with; her precious reasoning was that her money would last as long as she should need it, that a magnificent marriage would crown her charms before she should be really pinched. She had a sum put by for a liberal outfit; meanwhile, the proper use of the rest was to decorate her for the approaches to the altar, keep her afloat in the society in which she would most naturally meet her match. Lord Iffield had been seen with her at Lucerne, at Cadenabbia; but it was Mrs. Meldrum's conviction that nothing was to be expected of him but the most futile flirtation. The girl had a certain hold of him, but, with a great deal of swagger, he had n't the spirit of a sheep: he was in fear of his father, and would never commit himself in Lord Considine's lifetime. The most Flora might achieve would be that he would n't marry any one else. Geoffrey Dawling, to Mrs. Meldrum's knowledge (I had told her of the young man's visit), had attached himself, on the way back from Italy, to the Hammond-Synge party; and my informant was in a position to be definite about this dangler. She knew about his people; she had heard of him before. Had n't he been, at Oxford, a friend of one of her nephews? Had n't he spent the Christmas holidays, precisely three years before, at her brother-in-law's in Yorkshire, taking that occasion to get himself refused with derision by willful Betty, the second daughter of the house? Her sister, who liked the floundering youth, had written to her to complain of Betty, and that the young man should now turn up as an

appendage of Flora's was one of those often-cited proofs that the world is small and that there are not enough people to go round. His father had been something or other in the Treasury; his grandfather, on the mother's side, had been something or other in the Church. He had come into the paternal estate, two or three thousand a year, in Hampshire; but he had let the place advantageously, and was generous to four ugly sisters who lived at Bournemouth and adored him. The family was hideous all round, but the salt of the earth. He was supposed to be unspeakably clever; he was fond of London, fond of books, of intellectual society, and of the idea of a political career. That such a man should be at the same time fond of Flora Saunt attested, as the phrase in the first volume of Gibbon has it, the variety of his inclinations. I was soon to learn that he was fonder of her than of all the other things together. Betty, one of five, and with views above her station, was at any rate felt, at home, to have dished herself by her folly. Of course no one had looked at her since, and no one would ever look at her again. It would be eminently desirable that Flora should learn the lesson of Betty's fate.

I was not struck, I confess, with all this in my mind, by any symptoms on our young lady's part of that sort of meditation. The only moral she saw in anything was that of her incomparable countenance, which Mr. Dawling, smitten, even like the railway porters and the cabmen, by the doom-dealing gods, had followed from London to Venice, and from Venice back to London again. I afterwards learned that her version of this episode was profusely inexact: his personal acquaintance with her had been determined by an accident remarkable enough, I admit, in connection with what had gone before, a coincidence at all events superficially striking. At Munich, returning from a tour in the Tyrol with two of his sisters, he had