The one moral she saw in anything was that of her incomparable aspect, which Mr.Dawling, smitten even like the railway porters and the cabmen by the doom-dealing gods, had followed from London to Venice and from Venice back to London again.

I afterwards learned that her version of this episode was profusely inexact: his personal acquaintance with her had been determined by an accident remarkable enough, I admit, in connexion with what had gone before--a coincidence at all events superficially striking.

At Munich, returning from a tour in the Tyrol with two of his sisters, he had found himself at the table d'hote of his inn opposite to the full presentment of that face of which the mere clumsy copy had made him dream and desire.

He had been tossed by it to a height so vertiginous as to involve a retreat from the board; but the next day he had dropped with a resounding thud at the very feet of his apparition.

On the following, with an equal incoherence, a sacrifice even of his bewildered sisters, whom he left behind, he made an heroic effort to escape by flight from a fate of which he had already felt the cold breath.