I gasped, but my word had come: if she had lost her sight it was in this very loss that she had found again her beauty.

I managed to speak while we were still alone, before her companion had appeared.

"You're lovelier at this day than you have ever been in your life!" At the sound of my voice and that of the opening of the door her impatience broke into audible joy.

She sprang up, recognising me, always holding me, and gleefully cried to a gentleman who was arrested in the doorway by the sight of me: "He has come back, he has come back, and you should have heard what he says of me!" The gentleman was Geoffrey Dawling, and I thought it best to let him hear on the spot.

"How beautiful she is, my dear man--but how extraordinarily beautiful! More beautiful at this hour than ever, ever before!" It gave them almost equal pleasure and made Dawling blush to his eyes; while this in turn produced, in spite of deepened astonishment, a blest snap of the strain I had been struggling with.