"How can I tell what passed between them? I fled from the place."My companion stared. "Do you mean to say her eyesight's going?""Heaven forbid! In that case how could she take life as she does?""How DOES she take life? That's the question!" He sat there bewilderedly brooding; the tears rose to his lids; they reminded me of those I had seen in Flora's the day I risked my enquiry. The question he had asked was one that to my own satisfaction I was ready to answer, but I hesitated to let him hear as yet all that my reflections had suggested. I was indeed privately astonished at their ingenuity. For the present I only rejoined that it struck me she was playing a particular game; at which he went on as if he hadn't heard me, suddenly haunted with a fear, lost in the dark possibility. "Do you mean there's a danger of anything very bad?""My dear fellow, you must ask her special adviser.""Who in the world is her special adviser?"
"I haven't a conception. But we mustn't get too excited. My impression would be that she has only to observe a few ordinary rules, to exercise a little common sense."Dawling jumped at this. "I see--to stick to the pince-nez.""To follow to the letter her oculist's prescription, whatever it is and at whatever cost to her prettiness. It's not a thing to be trifled with.""Upon my honour it SHAN'T be!" he roundly declared; and he adjusted himself to his position again as if we had quite settled the business. After a considerable interval, while I botched away, he suddenly said: "Did they make a great difference?""A great difference?"
"Those things she had put on."
"Oh the glasses--in her beauty? She looked queer of course, but it was partly because one was unaccustomed. There are women who look charming in nippers. What, at any rate, if she does look queer?
She must be mad not to accept that alternative.""She IS mad," said Geoffrey Dawling.
"Mad to refuse you, I grant. Besides," I went on, "the pince-nez, which was a large and peculiar one, was all awry: she had half pulled it off, but it continued to stick, and she was crimson, she was angry.""It must have been horrible!" my companion groaned.
"It WAS horrible. But it's still more horrible to defy all warnings; it's still more horrible to be landed in--" Without saying in what I disgustedly shrugged my shoulders.
After a glance at me Dawling jerked round. "Then you do believe that she may be?"I hesitated. "The thing would be to make HER believe it. She only needs a good scare.""But if that fellow is shocked at the precautions she does take?""Oh who knows?" I rejoined with small sincerity. "I don't suppose Iffield is absolutely a brute.""I would take her with leather blinders, like a shying mare!" cried Geoffrey Dawling.
I had an impression that Iffield wouldn't, but I didn't communicate it, for I wanted to pacify my friend, whom I had discomposed too much for the purposes of my sitting. I recollect that I did some good work that morning, but it also comes back to me that before we separated he had practically revealed to me that my anecdote, connecting itself in his mind with a series of observations at the time unconscious and unregistered, had covered with light the subject of our colloquy. He had had a formless perception of some secret that drove Miss Saunt to subterfuges, and the more he thought of it the more he guessed this secret to be the practice of making believe she saw when she didn't and of cleverly keeping people from finding out how little she saw. When one pieced things together it was astonishing what ground they covered. Just as he was going away he asked me from what source at Folkestone the horrid tale had proceeded. When I had given him, as I saw no reason not to do, the name of Mrs. Meldrum he exclaimed: "Oh Iknow all about her; she's a friend of some friends of mine!" At this I remembered wilful Betty and said to myself that I knew some one who would probably prove more wilful still.
