CHAPTER III

This conversation occurred the night before I went back to town.  I settled on the morrow to take a late train, so that I had still my morning to spend at Folkestone, where during the greater part of it I was out with my mother.  Every one in the place was as usual out with some one else, and even had I been free to go and take leave of her I should have been sure that Flora Saunt would not be at home.  Just where she was I presently discovered:  she was at the far end of the cliff, the point at which it overhangs the pretty view of Sandgate and Hythe.  Her back, however, was turned to this attraction; it rested with the aid of her elbows, thrust slightly behind her so that her scanty little shoulders were raised toward her ears, on the high rail that inclosed the down.  Two gentlemen stood before her whose faces we couldn’t see but who even as observed from the rear were visibly absorbed in the charming figure-piece submitted to them.  I was freshly struck with the fact that this meagre and defective little person, with the cock of her hat and the flutter of her crape, with her eternal idleness, her eternal happiness, her absence of moods and mysteries and the pretty presentation of her feet, which especially now in the supported slope of her posture occupied with their imperceptibility so much of the foreground—­I was reminded anew, I say, how our young lady dazzled by some art that the enumeration of her merits didn’t explain and that the mention of her lapses didn’t affect.  Where she was amiss nothing counted, and where she was right everything did.  I say she was wanting in mystery, but that after all was her secret.  This happened to be my first chance of introducing her to my mother, who had not much left in life but the quiet look from under the hood of her chair at the things which, when she should have quitted those she loved, she could still trust to make the world good for them.  I wondered an instant how much she might be moved to trust Flora Saunt, and then while the chair stood still and she waited I went over and asked the girl to come and speak to her.  In this way I saw that if one of Flora’s attendants was the inevitable young Hammond Synge, master of ceremonies of her regular court, always offering the use of a telescope and accepting that of a cigar, the other was a personage I had not yet encountered, a small pale youth in showy knickerbockers, whose eyebrows and nose and the glued points of whose little moustache were extraordinarily uplifted and sustained.  I remember taking him at first for a foreigner and for something of a pretender:  I scarce know why unless because of the motive I felt in the stare he fixed on me when I asked Miss Saunt to come away.  He struck me a little as a young man practising the social art of impertinence; but it didn’t matter, for Flora came away with alacrity, bringing all her prettiness and pleasure and gliding