I had faced her again just in time to take it, and I immediately made up my mind how best to do so. “Then I go utterly to pieces!”

“You shouldn’t have perched yourself,” she laughed — she could by this time almost coarsely laugh — “in such a preposterous place!”

“Ah, that’s my affair,” I returned, “and if I accept the consequences I don’t quite see what you’ve to say to it. That I do accept them — so far as I make them out as not too intolerable and you as not intending them to be — that I do accept them is what I’ve been trying to signify to you. Only my fall,” I added, “is an inevitable shock. You remarked to me a few minutes since that you didn’t recover yourself in a flash. I differ from you, you see, in that I do; I take my collapse all at once. Here then I am. I’m smashed. I don’t see, as I look about me, a piece I can pick up. I don’t attempt to account for my going wrong; I don’t attempt to account for yours with me; I don’t attempt to account for anything. If Long is just what he always was it settles the matter, and the special clincher for us can be but your honest final impression, made precisely more aware of itself by repentance for the levity with which you had originally yielded to my contagion.”

She didn’t insist on her repentance; she was too taken up with the facts themselves. “Oh, but add to my impression everyone else’s impression! Has anyone noticed anything?”

“Ah, I don’t know what anyone has noticed. I haven’t,” I brooded, “ventured — as you know — to ask anyone.”

“Well, if you had you’d have seen — seen, I mean, all they don’t see. If they had been conscious they’d have talked.”

I thought. “To me?”

“Well, I’m not sure to you; people have such a notion of what you embroider on things that they’re rather afraid to commit themselves or to lead you on: they’re sometimes in, you know,” she luminously reminded me, “for more than they bargain for, than they quite know what to do with, or than they care to have on their hands.”

I tried to do justice to this account of myself. “You mean I see so much?”

It was a delicate matter, but she risked it. “Don’t you sometimes see horrors?”

I wondered. “Well, names are a convenience. People catch me in the act?”

“They certainly think you critical.”

“And is criticism the vision of horrors?”

She couldn’t quite be sure where I was taking her. “It isn’t, perhaps, so much that you see them —— ”

I started. “As that I perpetrate them?”

She was sure now, however, and wouldn’t have it, for she was serious. “Dear no — you don’t perpetrate anything. Perhaps it would be better if you did!” she tossed off with an odd laugh. “But — always by people’s idea — you like them.”

I followed. “Horrors?”

“Well, you don’t —— ”

“Yes ——?”

But she wouldn’t be hurried now. “You take them too much for what they are. You don’t seem to want —— ”

“To come down on them strong? Oh, but I often do!”

“So much the better then.”

“Though I do like — whether for that or not,” I hastened to confess, “to look them first well in the face.”

Our eyes met, with this, for a minute, but she made nothing of that. “When they have no face, then, you can’t do it! It isn’t at all events now a question,” she went on, “of people’s keeping anything back, and you’re perhaps in any case not the person to whom it would first have come.”

I tried to think then who the person would be. “It would have come to Long himself?”

But she was impatient of this. “Oh, one doesn’t know what comes — or what doesn’t — to Long himself! I’m not sure he’s too modest to misrepresent — if he had the intelligence to play a part.”

“Which he hasn’t!” I concluded.

“Which he hasn’t. It’s to me they might have spoken — or to each other.”

“But I thought you exactly held they had chattered in accounting for his state by the influence of Lady John.”

She got the matter instantly straight. “Not a bit. That chatter was mine only — and produced to meet yours. There had so, by your theory, to be a woman —— ”

“That, to oblige me, you invented her? Precisely. But I thought —— ”

“You needn’t have thought!” Mrs. Briss broke in. “I didn’t invent her.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“I didn’t invent her,” she repeated, looking at me hard. “She’s true.” I echoed it in vagueness, though instinctively again in protest; yet I held my breath, for this was really the point at which I felt my companion’s forces most to have mustered. Her manner now moreover gave me a great idea of them, and her whole air was of taking immediate advantage of my impression. “Well, see here: since you’ve wanted it, I’m afraid that, however little you may like it, you’ll have to take it. You’ve pressed me for explanations and driven me much harder than you must have seen I found convenient. If I’ve seemed to beat about the bush it’s because I hadn’t only myself to think of. One can be simple for one’s self — one can’t be, always, for others.”

“Ah, to whom do you say it?” I encouragingly sighed; not even yet quite seeing for what issue she was heading.

She continued to make for the spot, whatever it was, with a certain majesty. “I should have preferred to tell you nothing more than what I have told you. I should have preferred to close our conversation on the simple announcement of my recovered sense of proportion. But you have, I see, got me in too deep.”

“O-oh!” I courteously attenuated.

“You’ve made of me,” she lucidly insisted, “too big a talker, too big a thinker, of nonsense.”

“Thank you,” I laughed, “for intimating that I trifle so agreeably.”

“Oh, you’ve appeared not to mind! But let me then at last not fail of the luxury of admitting that I mind. Yes, I mind particularly. I may be bad, but I’ve a grain of gumption.”

“‘Bad’?” It seemed more closely to concern me.

“Bad I may be. In fact,” she pursued at this high pitch and pressure, “there’s no doubt whatever I am.”

“I’m delighted to hear it,” I cried, “for it was exactly something strong I wanted of you!”

“It is then strong” — and I could see indeed she was ready to satisfy me. “You’ve worried me for my motive and harassed me for my ‘moment,’ and I’ve had to protect others and, at the cost of a decent appearance, to pretend to be myself half an idiot. I’ve had even, for the same purpose — if you must have it — to depart from the truth; to give you, that is, a false account of the manner of my escape from your tangle. But now the truth shall be told, and others can take care of themselves!” She had so wound herself up with this, reached so the point of fairly heaving with courage and candour, that I for an instant almost miscalculated her direction and believed she was really throwing up her cards. It was as if she had decided, on some still finer lines, just to rub my nose into what I had been spelling out; which would have been an anticipation of my own journey’s crown of the most disconcerting sort. I wanted my personal confidence, but I wanted nobody’s confession, and without the journey’s crown where was the personal confidence? Without the personal confidence, moreover, where was the personal honour? That would be really the single thing to which I could attach authority, for a confession might, after all, be itself a lie. Anybody, at all events, could fit the shoe to one. My friend’s intention, however, remained but briefly equivocal; my danger passed, and I recognised in its place a still richer assurance. It was not the unnamed, in short, who were to be named. “Lady John is the woman.”

Yet even this was prodigious. “But I thought your present position was just that she’s not!”

“Lady John is the woman,” Mrs. Briss again announced.

“But I thought your present position was just that nobody is!”

“Lady John is the woman,” she a third time declared.

It naturally left me gaping. “Then there is one?” I cried between bewilderment and joy.

“A woman? There’s her!” Mrs. Briss replied with more force than grammar. “I know,” she briskly, almost breezily added, “that I said she wouldn’t do (as I had originally said she would do better than any one), when you a while ago mentioned her. But that was to save her.”

“And you don’t care now,” I smiled, “if she’s lost!”

She hesitated. “She is lost. But she can take care of herself.”

I could but helplessly think of her. “I’m afraid indeed that, with what you’ve done with her, I can’t take care of her. But why is she now to the purpose,” I articulately wondered, “any more than she was?”

“Why? On the very system you yourself laid down. When we took him for brilliant, she couldn’t be. But now that we see him as he is —— ”

“We can only see her also as she is?” Well, I tried, as far as my amusement would permit, so to see her; but still there were difficulties. “Possibly!” I at most conceded. “Do you owe your discovery, however, wholly to my system? My system, where so much made for protection,” I explained, “wasn’t intended to have the effect of exposure.”

“It appears to have been at all events intended,” my companion returned, “to have the effect of driving me to the wall; and the consequence of that effect is nobody’s fault but your own.”

She was all logic now, and I could easily see, between my light and my darkness, how she would remain so. Yet I was scarce satisfied. “And it’s only on ‘that effect’ ——?”

“That I’ve made up my mind?” She was positively free at last to enjoy my discomfort. “Wouldn’t it be surely, if your ideas were worth anything, enough? But it isn’t,” she added, “only on that. It’s on something else.”

I had after an instant extracted from this the single meaning it could appear to yield. “I’m to understand that you know?”

“That they’re intimate enough for anything?” She faltered, but she brought it out. “I know.”

It was the oddest thing in the world for a little, the way this affected me without my at all believing it. It was preposterous, hang though it would with her somersault, and she had quite succeeded in giving it the note of sincerity. It was the mere sound of it that, as I felt even at the time, made it a little of a blow — a blow of the smart of which I was conscious just long enough inwardly to murmur: “What if she should be right?” She had for these seconds the advantage of stirring within me the memory of her having indeed, the day previous, at Paddington, “known” as I hadn’t. It had been really on what she then knew that we originally started, and an element of our start had been that I admired her freedom. The form of it, at least — so beautifully had she recovered herself — was all there now. Well, I at any rate reflected, it wasn’t the form that need trouble me, and I quickly enough put her a question that related only to the matter. “Of course if she is — it is smash!”

“And haven’t you yet got used to its being?”

I kept my eyes on her; I traced the buried figure in the ruins. “She’s good enough for a fool; and so” — I made it out — “is he! If he is the same ass — yes — they might be.”

“And he is,” said Mrs. Briss, “the same ass!”

I continued to look at her. “He would have no need then of her having transformed and inspired him.”

“Or of her having deformed and idiotised herself,” my friend subjoined.

Oh, how it sharpened my look! “No, no — she wouldn’t need that.”

“The great point is that he wouldn’t!” Mrs. Briss laughed.

I kept it up. “She would do perfectly.”

Mrs. Briss was not behind. “My dear man, she has got to do!”

This was brisker still, but I held my way. “Almost anyone would do.”

It seemed for a little, between humour and sadness, to strike her. “Almost anyone would. Still,” she less pensively declared, “we want the right one.”

“Surely; the right one” — I could only echo it. “But how,” I then proceeded, “has it happily been confirmed to you?”

It pulled her up a trifle. “‘Confirmed’ ——?”

“That he’s her lover.”

My eyes had been meeting hers without, as it were, hers quite meeting mine. But at this there had to be intercourse. “By my husband.”

It pulled me up a trifle. “Brissenden knows?”

She hesitated; then, as if at my tone, gave a laugh. “Don’t you suppose I’ve told him?”

I really couldn’t but admire her. “Ah — so you have talked!”

It didn’t confound her. “One’s husband isn’t talk. You’re cruel moreover,” she continued, “to my joke. It was Briss, poor dear, who talked — though, I mean, only to me. He knows.”

I cast about. “Since when?”

But she had it ready. “Since this evening.”

Once more I couldn’t but smile. “Just in time then! And the way he knows ——?”

“Oh, the way!” — she had at this a slight drop. But she came up again. “I take his word.”

“You haven’t then asked him?”

“The beauty of it was — half an hour ago, upstairs — that I hadn’t to ask. He came out with it himself, and that — to give you the whole thing — was, if you like, my moment. He dropped it on me,” she continued to explain, “without in the least, sweet innocent, knowing what he was doing; more, at least, that is, than give her away.”

“Which,” I concurred, “was comparatively nothing!”

But she had no ear for irony, and she made out still more of her story. “He’s simple — but he sees.”

“And when he sees” — I completed the picture — “he luckily tells.”

She quite agreed with me that it was lucky, but without prejudice to his acuteness and to what had been in him moreover a natural revulsion. “He has seen, in short; there comes some chance when one does. His, as luckily as you please, came this evening. If you ask me what it showed him you ask more than I’ve either cared or had time to ask. Do you consider, for that matter” — she put it to me — “that one does ask?” As her high smoothness — such was the wonder of this reascendancy — almost deprived me of my means, she was wise and gentle with me. “Let us leave it alone.”

I fairly, while my............