I seemed to catch the tail of his idea.  “Mrs. Meldrum’s?”

“They’re so awfully ugly and they add so to the dear woman’s ugliness.”  This remark began to flash a light, and when he quickly added “She sees herself, she sees her own fate!” my response was so immediate that I had almost taken the words out of his mouth.  While I tried to fix this sudden image of Flora’s face glazed in and cross-barred even as Mrs. Meldrum’s was glazed and barred, he went on to assert that only the horror of that image, looming out at herself, could be the reason of her avoiding the person who so forced it home.  The fact he had encountered made everything hideously vivid, and more vivid than anything else that just such another pair of goggles was what would have been prescribed to Flora.

“I see—­I see,” I presently returned.  “What would become of Lord Iffield if she were suddenly to come out in them?  What indeed would become of every one, what would become of everything?” This was an enquiry that Dawling was evidently unprepared to meet, and I completed it by saying at last:  “My dear fellow, for that matter, what would become of you?”

Once more he turned on me his good green eyes.  “Oh I shouldn’t mind!”

The tone of his words somehow made his ugly face beautiful, and I discovered at this moment how much I really liked him.  None the less, at the same time, perversely and rudely, I felt the droll side of our discussion of such alternatives.  It made me laugh out and say to him while I laughed:  “You’d take her even with those things of Mrs. Meldrum’s?”

He remained mournfully grave; I could see that he was surprised at my rude mirth.  But he summoned back a vision of the lady at Folkestone and conscientiously replied:  “Even with those things of Mrs. Meldrum’s.”  I begged him not to resent my laughter, which but exposed the fact that we had built a monstrous castle in the air.  Didn’t he see on what flimsy ground the structure rested?  The evidence was preposterously small.  He believed the worst, but we were really uninformed.

“I shall find out the truth,” he promptly replied.

“How can you?  If you question her you’ll simply drive her to perjure herself.  Wherein after all does it concern you to know the truth?  It’s the girl’s own affair.”

“Then why did you tell me your story?”

I was a trifle embarrassed.  “To warn you off,” I smiled.  He took no more notice of these words than presently to remark that Lord Iffield had no serious intentions.  “Very possibly,” I said.  “But you mustn’t speak as if Lord Iffield and you were her only alternatives.”

Dawling thought a moment.  “Couldn’t something be got out of the people she has consulted?  She must have been to people.  How else can she have been condemned?”

“Condemned to what?  Condemned to perpetual nippers?  Of course she has consulted some of the big specialists, but she has done it, you may be sure, in the most clandestine manner; and even if it were supposable that they would tell you anything—­which I altogether doubt—­you would have great difficulty in finding out which men they are.  Therefore leave it alone; never show her what you suspect.”