So we parted, and I returned to London and to my duties at Barbara’s Building.  I wrote daily, and her dictated answers gave me knowledge of her progress.  To my immense relief, I heard that the oculist’s skill had saved her eyesight; but it could not obliterate the traces of the cruel claws.

The days, although fuller with work and interests, appeared long until she came.  I saw but little of the outside world.  Dale, my sister Agatha, Sir Joshua Oldfield, and Campion were the only friends I met.  Dale was ingenuously sympathetic when he head of the calamity.

“What’s going to happen?” he asked, after he had exhausted his vocabulary of abuse on cats, Providence and Anastasius Papadopoulos.  “What’s the poor dear going to do?”

“If I am going to have any voice in the matter,” said I, “she is going to marry me.”

He wrung me by the hand enthusiastically and declared that I was the splendidest fellow that ever lived.  Then he sighed.

“I am going about like a sheep without a leader.  For Heaven’s sake, come back into politics.  Form a hilarious little party of your own—­anything—­so long as you’re back and take me with you.”

“Come to Barbara’s Building,” said I.

But he made a wry face, and said that he did not think Maisie would like it.  I laughed and put my hand on his shoulder.

“My son, you have a leader already, and she has already tied a blue riband round your woolly neck, and she is pulling you wherever she wants to go.  And it’s all to the infinite advantage of your eternal soul.”

Whereupon he grinned and departed to the sheepfold.

At last Lola came.  She begged me not to meet her at the station, but to go round after dinner to Cadogan Gardens.

Dawkins opened the door for me and showed me into the familiar drawing-room.  The long summer day was nearing its end, and only a dim twilight came through the open windows.  Lola was standing rigid on the hearthrug, her hand shielding the whole of the right side of her face.  With the free hand she checked my impetuous advance.

“Stop and look!” she said, and then dropped the shielding hand, and stood before me with twitching lips and death in her eyes.  I saw in a flash the devastation that had been wrought; but, thank God, I pierced beneath it to the anguish in her heart.  The pity—­the awful, poignant pity—­of it smote me.  Everything that was man in me surged towards her.  What she saw in my eyes I know not; but in hers dawned a sudden wonder.  There was no recoil of shock, such as she had steeled herself to encounter.  I sprang forward and clasped her in my arms.  Her stiffened frame gradually relaxed and our lips met, and in that kiss all fears and doubts were dissolved for ever.

Some hours later she said:  “If you are blind enough to care for a maimed thing like me, I can’t help it.  I shall never understand it to my dying day,” she added with a long sigh.