know what quick pleasure flickered into the hope that she would at last see me.  She did see me:  she suddenly bent forward to take up the little double-barrelled ivory glass that rested on the edge of the box and to all appearance fix me with it.  I smiled from my place straight up at the searching lenses, and after an instant she dropped them and smiled as straight back at me.  Oh her smile—­it was her old smile, her young smile, her very own smile made perfect!  I instantly left my stall and hurried off for a nearer view of it; quite flushed, I remember, as I went with the annoyance of having happened to think of the idiotic way I had tried to paint her.  Poor Iffield with his sample of that error, and still poorer Dawling in particular with his!  I hadn’t touched her, I was professionally humiliated, and as the attendant in the lobby opened her box for me I felt that the very first thing I should have to say to her would be that she must absolutely sit to me again.

CHAPTER XIII

She gave me the smile once more as over her shoulder, from her chair, she turned her face to me.  “Here you are again!” she exclaimed with her disgloved hand put up a little backward for me to take.  I dropped into a chair just behind her and, having taken it and noted that one of the curtains of the box would make the demonstration sufficiently private, bent my lips over it and impressed them on its finger-tips.  It was given me however, to my astonishment, to feel next that all the privacy in the world couldn’t have sufficed to mitigate the start with which she greeted this free application of my moustache:  the blood had jumped to her face, she quickly recovered her hand and jerked at me, twisting herself round, a vacant challenging stare.  During the next few instants several extraordinary things happened, the first of which was that now I was close to them the eyes of loveliness I had come up to look into didn’t show at all the conscious light I had just been pleased to see them flash across the house:  they showed on the contrary, to my confusion, a strange sweet blankness, an expression I failed to give a meaning to until, without delay, I felt on my arm, directed to it as if instantly to efface the effect of her start, the grasp of the hand she had impulsively snatched from me.  It was the irrepressible question in this grasp that stopped on my lips all sound of salutation.  She had mistaken my entrance for that of another person, a pair of lips without a moustache.  She was feeling me to see who I was!  With the perception of this and of her not seeing me I sat gaping at her and at the wild word that didn’t come, the right word to express or to disguise my dismay.  What was the right word to commemorate one’s sudden discovery, at the very moment too at which one had been most encouraged to count on better things, that one’s dear old friend had gone blind?  Before the answer to this question dropped upon me—­and