CHAPTER XXVI.

ON THE SINGULAR EFFECTS OF SUNLIGHT

When I regained my bedroom, which, in spite of its manifold and ostentatious deficiencies, I had long regarded as a harbour of refuge in which I might find shelter when the storms of life pressed too hardly, I took out of my dress pocket--I always insisted on having a pocket in my dress, whatever the fashion was, it was the one point on which I would have my way--that scrap of paper. It was blank. That sentence must have been written on it with vanishing ink, because already not a trace of it could be seen. That process of fading must have proceeded with marvellous rapidity. I held in my hand a soiled, crumpled piece of paper, which was so void of anything in the shape of written characters, that I was at a loss as to which side of it those mysterious words had been on.

The brief hour of my triumph had faded too. I was again the plain, uninteresting Norah O’Brady; the ugly girl with the pretty sisters; the overgrown gawk, who always looked so ridiculous in the clothes she wore. As I had once heard myself described--the creature with the hands and feet. I was that pleasant person again, this time for ever and a day. I could hardly expect a second miraculous interference with the ordinance of nature.

And the story of that interposition would be scored up against me, in the family debtor and creditor account, to be used as another missile, when the tale of Norah’s clumsiness, bearishness, multitudinous stupidities, was once more the well-worn domestic theme. How amusing it would be to recall the day when the five men took her out to dine. How incredible it seemed, and, indeed, was. One must have dreamed it. By degrees, quite possibly, a legend would grow up that it was an elaborate practical joke which those five gentlemen had planned among themselves. And the Duke who called on her! You wouldn’t think it to look at her, would you? No one ever does believe it; but he actually