A few days later I again heard Dawling on my stairs, and even before he
passed my threshold I knew he had something to tell me.
“I’ve been down to Folkestone--it was necessary I should see her!” I
forget whether he had come straight from the station; he was at any
rate out of breath with his news, which it took me however a minute to
interpret.
“You mean that you’ve been with Mrs. Meldrum?”
“Yes; to ask her what she knows and how she comes to know it. It worked
upon me awfully--I mean what you told me.” He made a visible effort to
seem quieter than he was, and it showed me sufficiently that he had
not been reassured. I laid, to comfort him and smiling at a venture, a
friendly hand on his arm, and he dropped into my eyes, fixing them an
instant, a strange, distended look which might have expressed the cold
clearness of all that was to come. “I _know_--now!” he said with an
emphasis he rarely used.
“What then did Mrs. Meldrum tell you?”
“Only one thing that signified, for she has no real knowledge. But that
one thing was everything.”
“What is it then?”
“Why, that she can’t bear the sight of her.” His pronouns required some
arranging, but after I had successfully dealt with them I replied that
I knew perfectly Miss Saunt had a trick of turning her back on the good
lady of Folkestone. But what did that prove? “Have you never guessed?
I guessed as soon as she spoke!” Dawling towered over me in dismal
triumph. It was the first time in our acquaintance that, intellectually
speaking, this had occurred; but even so remarkable an incident still
left me sufficiently at sea to cause him to continue: “Why, the effect
of those spectacles!”