which led me wholly to dissent and our young lady to asseverate that she hadn’t in the least wished to get Mr. Dawling.  She mightn’t 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 the French capital, many accidents might have happened.

CHAPTER V

I had been again with my mother, but except Mrs. Meldrum and the gleam of France had not found at Folkestone my old resources and pastimes.  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 everybody than I could ever squeeze out of my colour-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 hadn’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 was that he wouldn’t marry some 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 group.  My informant was in a position to be definite about this dangler; she knew about his people; she had heard of him before.  Hadn’t he been a friend of one of her nephews at Oxford?  Hadn’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 wilful 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 oft-cited proofs that the world is small and that there are not enough people to go round.  His father had been something