I gave up by going, decidedly, to the smoking-room, where several men had gathered and where Obert, a little apart from them, was in charmed communion with the bookshelves. They are wonderful, everywhere, at Newmarch, the bookshelves, but he put a volume back as he saw me come in, and a moment later, when we were seated, I said to him again, as a recall of our previous passage, “Then you could tell what I was talking about!” And I added, to complete my reference, “Since you thought Mrs. Server was the person whom, when I stopped you, I was sorry to learn from you I had missed.”

His momentary silence appeared to admit the connection I established. “Then you find you have missed her? She wasn’t there for you?”

“There’s no one ‘there for me’; so that I fear that if you weren’t, as it happens, here for me, my amusement would be quite at an end. I had, in fact,” I continued, “already given it up as lost when I came upon you, a while since, in conversation with the lady we’ve named. At that, I confess, my prospects gave something of a flare. I said to myself that since your interest hadn’t then wholly dropped, why, even at the worst, should mine? Yours was mine, wasn’t it? for a little, this morning. Or was it mine that was yours? We exchanged, at any rate, some lively impressions. Only, before we had done, your effort dropped or your discretion intervened: you gave up, as none of your business, the question that had suddenly tempted us.”

“And you gave it up too,” said my friend.

“Yes, and it was on the idea that it was mine as little as yours that we separated.”

“Well then?” He kept his eyes, with his head thrown back, on the warm bindings, admirable for old gilt and old colour, that covered the opposite wall.

“Well then, if I’ve correctly gathered that you’re, in spite of our common renunciation, still interested, I confess to you that I am. I took my detachment too soon for granted. I haven’t been detached. I’m not, hang me! detached now. And it’s all because you were originally so suggestive.”

“Originally?”

“Why, from the moment we met here yesterday — the moment of my first seeing you with Mrs. Server. The look you gave me then was really the beginning of everything. Everything” — and I spoke now with real conviction — “was traceably to spring from it.”

“What do you mean,” he asked, “by everything?”

“Well, this failure of detachment. What you said to me as we were going up yesterday afternoon to dress — what you said to me then is responsible for it. And since it comes to that,” I pursued, “I make out for myself now that you’re not detached either — unless, that is, simply detached from me. I had indeed a suspicion of that as I passed through the room there.”

He smoked through another pause. “You’ve extraordinary notions of responsibility.”

I watched him a moment, but he only stared at the books without looking round. Something in his voice had made me more certain, and my certainty made me laugh. “I see you are serious!”

But he went on quietly enough. “You’ve extraordinary notions of responsibility. I deny altogether mine.”

“You are serious — you are!” I repeated with a gaiety that I meant as inoffensive and that I believe remained so. “But no matter. You’re no worse than I.”

“I’m clearly, by your own story, not half so bad. But, as you say, no matter. I don’t care.”

I ventured to keep it up. “Oh, don’t you?”

His good nature was proof. “I don’t care.”

“Then why didn’t you so much as look at me a while ago?”

“Didn’t I look at you?”

“You know perfectly you didn’t. Mrs. Server did — with her unutterable intensity; making me feel afresh, by the way, that I’ve never seen a woman compromise herself so little by proceedings so compromising. But though you saw her intensity, it never diverted you for an instant from your own.”

He lighted before he answered this a fresh cigarette. “A man engaged in talk with a charming woman scarcely selects that occasion for winking at somebody else.”

“You mean he contents himself with winking at her? My dear fellow, that wasn’t enough for you yesterday, and it wouldn’t have been enough for you this morning, among the impressions that led to our last talk. It was just the fact that you did wink, that you had winked, at me that wound me up.”

“And what about the fact that you had winked at me? Your winks — come” — Obert laughed — “are portentous!”

“Oh, if we recriminate,” I cheerfully said after a moment, “we agree.”

“I’m not so sure,” he returned, “that we agree.”

“Ah, then, if we differ it’s still more interesting. Because, you know, we didn’t differ either yesterday or this morning.”

Without hurry or flurry, but with a decent confusion, his thoughts went back. “I thought you said just now we did — recognising, as you ought, that you were keen about a chase of which I washed my hands.”

“No — I wasn’t keen. You’ve just mentioned that you remember my giving up. I washed my hands too.”

It seemed to leave him with the moral of this. “Then, if our hands are clean, what are we talking about?”

I turned, on it, a little more to him, and looked at him so long that he had at last to look at me; with which, after holding his eyes another moment, I made my point. “Our hands are not clean.”

“Ah, speak for your own!” — and as he moved back I might really have thought him uneasy. There was a hint of the same note in the way he went on: “I assure you I decline all responsibility. I see the responsibility as quite beautifully yours.”

“Well,” I said, “I only want to be fair. You were the first to bring it out that she was changed.”

“Well, she isn’t changed!” said my friend with an almost startling effect, for me, of suddenness. “Or rather,” he immediately and incongruously added, “she is. She’s changed back.”

“‘Back’?” It made me stare.

“Back,” he repeated with a certain sharpness and as if to have done at last, for himself, with the muddle of it.

But there was that in me that could let him see he had far from done; and something, above all, told me now that he absolutely mustn’t have before I had. I quickly moreover saw that I must, with an art, make him want not to. “Back to what she was when you painted her?”

He had to think an instant for this. “No — not quite to that.”

“To what then?”

He tried in a manner to oblige me. “To something else.”

It seemed so, for my thought, the gleam of something that fitted, that I was almost afraid of quenching the gleam by pressure. I must then get everything I could from him without asking too much. “You don’t quite know to what else?”

“No — I don’t quite know.” But there was a sound in it, this time, that I took as the hint of a wish to know — almost a recognition that I might help him.

I helped him accordingly as I could and, I may add, as far as the positive flutter he had stirred in me suffered. It fitted — it fitted! “If her change is to something other, I suppose then a change back is not quite the exact name for it.”

“Perhaps not.” I fairly thrilled at his taking the suggestion as if it were an assistance. “She isn’t at any rate what I thought her yesterday.”

It was amazing into what depths this dropped for me and with what possibilities it mingled. “I remember what you said of her yesterday.”

I drew him on so that I brought back for him the very words he had used. “She was so beastly unhappy.” And he used them now visibly not as a remembrance of what he had said, but for the contrast of the fact with what he at present perceived; so that the value this gave for me to what he at present perceived was immense.

“And do you mean that that’s gone?”

He hung fire, however, a little as to saying so much what he meant, and while he waited he again looked at me. “What do you mean? Don’t you think so yourself?”

I laid my hand on his arm and held him a moment with a grip that betrayed, I daresay, the effort in me to keep my thoughts together and lose not a thread. It betrayed at once, doubtless, the danger of that failure and the sharp foretaste of success. I remember that with it, absolutely, I struck myself as knowing again the joy of the intellectual mastery of things unamenable, that joy of determining, almost of creating results, which I have already mentioned as an exhilaration attached to some of my plunges of insight. “It would take long to tell you what I mean.”

The tone of it made him fairly watch me as I had been watching him. “Well, haven’t we got the whole night?”

“Oh, it would take more than the whole night — even if we had it!”

“By which you suggest that we haven’t it?”

“No — we haven’t it. I want to get away.”

“To go to bed? I thought you were so keen.”

“I am keen. Keen is no word for it. I don’t want to go to bed. I want to get away.”

“To leave the house — in the middle of the night?”

“Yes — absurd as it may seem. You excite me too much. You don’t know what you do to me.”

He continued to look at me; then he gave a laugh which was not the contradiction, but quite the attestation, of the effect produced on him by my grip. If I had wanted to hold him I held him. It only came to me even that I held him too much. I felt this in fact with the next thing he said. “If you’re too excited, then, to be coherent now, will you tell me to-morrow?”

I took time myself now to relight. Ridiculous as it may sound, I had my nerves to steady; which is a proof, surely, that for real excitement there are no such adventures as intellectual ones. “Oh, to-morrow I shall be off in space!”

“Certainly we shall neither of us be here. But can’t we arrange, say, to meet in town, or even to go up together in such conditions as will enable us to talk?”

I patted his arm again. “Thank you for your patience. It’s really good of you. Who knows if I shall be alive to-morrow? We are meeting. We do talk.”

But with all I had to think of I must have fallen, on this, into the deepest of silences, for the next thing I remember is his returning: “We don’t!” I repeated my gesture of reassurance, I conveyed that I should be with him again in a minute, and presently, while he gave me time, he came back to something of his own. “My wink, at all events, would have been nothing for any question between us, as I’ve just said, without yours. That’s what I call your responsibility. It was, as we put the matter, the torch of your analogy —— ”

“Oh, the torch of my analogy!”

I had so groaned it — as if for very ecstasy — that it pulled him up, and I could see his curiosity as indeed reaffected. But he went on with a coherency that somewhat admonished me: “It was your making me, as I told you this morning, think over what you had said about Brissenden and his wife: it was that —— ”

“That made you think over” — I took him straight up — “what you yourself had said about our troubled lady? Yes, precisely. That was the torch of my analogy. What I showed you in the one case seemed to tell you what to look for in the other. You thought it over. I accuse you of nothing worse than of having thought it over. But you see what thinking it over does for it.”

The way I said this appeared to amuse him. “I see what it does for you!”

“No, you don’t! Not at all yet. That’s just the embarrassment.”

“Just whose?” If I had thanked him for his patience he showed that he deserved it. “Just yours?”

“Well, say mine. But when you do ——!” And I paused as for the rich promise of it.

“When I do see where you are, you mean?”

“The only difficulty is whether you can see. But we must try. You’ve set me whirling round, but we must go step by step. Oh, but it’s all in your germ!” — I kept that up. “If she isn’t now beastly unhappy —— ”

“She’s beastly happy?” he broke in, getting firmer hold, if not of the real impression he had just been gathering under my eyes, then at least of something he had begun to make out that my argument required. “Well, that is the way I see her difference. Her difference, I mean,” he added, in his evident wish to work with me, “her difference from her other difference! There!” He laughed as if, also, he had found himself fairly fantastic. “Isn’t that clear for you?”

“Crystalline — for me. But that’s because I know why.”

I can see again now the long look that, on this, he gave me. I made out already much of what was in it. “So then do I!”

“But how in the world ——? I know, for myself, how I know.”

“So then do I,” he after a moment repeated.

“And can you tell me?”

“Certainly. But what I’ve already named to you — the torch of your analogy.”

I turned this over. “You’ve made evidently an admirable use of it. But the wonderful thing is that you seem to have done so without having all the elements.”

He on his side considered. “What do you call all the elements?”

“Oh, it would take me long to tell you!” I couldn’t help laughing at the comparative simplicity with which he asked it. “That’s the sort of thing we just now spoke of taking a day for. At any rate, such as they are, these elements,” I went on, “I believe myself practically in possession of them. But what I don’t quite see is how you can be.”

Well, he was able to tell me. “Why in the world shouldn’t your analogy have put me?” He spoke with gaiety, but with lucidity. “I’m not an idiot either.”

“I see.” But there was so much!

“Did you think I was?” he amiably asked.

“No. I see,” I repeated. Yet I didn’t, really, fully; which he presently perceived.

“You made me think of your view of the Brissenden pair till I could think of nothing else.”

“Yes — yes,” I said. “Go on.”

“Well, as you had planted the theory in me, it began to bear fruit. I began to watch them. I continued to watch them. I did nothing but watch them.”

The sudden lowering of his voice in this confession — as if it had represented a sort of darkening of his consciousness — again amused me. “You too? How then we’ve been occupied! For I, you see, have watched — or had, until I found you just now with Mrs. Server — everyone, everything but you.”

“Oh, I’ve watched you,” said Ford Obert as if he had then perhaps after all the advantage of me. “I admit that I made you out for myself to be back on the scent; for I thought I made you out baffled.”

To learn whether I really had been was, I saw, what he would most have liked; but I also saw that he had, as to this, a scruple about asking me. What I most saw, however, was that to tell him I should have to understand. “What scent do you allude to?”

He smiled as if I might have fancied I could fence. “Why, the pursuit of the identification that’s none of our business — the identification of her lover.”

“Ah, it’s as to that,” I instantly replied, “you’ve judged me baffled? I’m afraid,” I almost as quickly added, “that I must admit I have been. Luckily, at all events, it is none of our business.”

“Yes,” said my friend, amused on his side, “nothing’s our business that we can’t find out. I saw you hadn’t found him. And what,” Obert continued, “does he matter now?”

It took but a moment to place me for seeing that my companion’s conviction on this point was a conviction decidedly to respect; and even that amount of hesitation was but the result of my wondering how he had reached it. “What, indeed?” I promptly replied. “But how did you see I had failed?”

“By seeing that I myself had. For I’ve been looking too. He isn’t here,” said Ford Obert.

Delighted as I was that he should believe it, I was yet struck by the complacency of his confidence, which connected itself again with my observation of their so recent colloquy. “Oh, for you to be so sure, has Mrs. Server squared you?”

“Is he here?” he for all answer to this insistently asked.

I faltered but an instant. “No; he isn’t here. It’s no thanks to one’s scruples, but perhaps it’s lucky for one’s manners. I speak at least for mine. If you’ve watched,” I pursued, “you’ve doubtless sufficiently seen what has already become of mine. He isn’t here, at all events,” I repeated, “and we must do without his identity. What, in fact, are we showing each other,” I asked, “but that we have done without it?”

“I have!” my friend declared with supreme frankness and with something of the note, as I was obliged to recognise, of my own constructive joy. “I’ve done perfectly without it.”

I saw in fact that he had, and it struck me really as wonderful. But I controlled the expression of my wonder. “So that if you spoke therefore just now of watching them —— ”

“I meant of course” — he took it straight up — “watching the Brissendens. And naturally, above all,” he as quickly subjoined, “the wife.”

I was now full of concurrence. “Ah, naturally, above all, the wife.”

So far as was required it encouraged him. “A woman’s lover doesn’t matter — doesn’t matter at least to anyone but himself, doesn’t matter to you or to me or to her — when once she has given him up.”

It made me, this testimony of his observation, show, in spite............