ne might have seen nothing; but I was
not less aware that one couldn't know anything without seeing all; and
so it was that, while our pianist played, my wandering vision played and
played as well. It took in again, while it went from one of them to the
other, the delicate light that each had shed on the other, and it made
me wonder afresh what still more delicate support they themselves might
not be in the very act of deriving from their dim community. It was for
the glimmer of this support that I had left them together two or three
hours before; yet I was obliged to recognise that, travel between them
as my fancy might, it could detect nothing in the way of a consequent
result. I caught no look from either that spoke to me of service
rendered them; and I caught none, in particular, from one of them to the
other, that I could read as a symptom of their having compared notes.
The fellow-feeling of each for the lost light of the other remained for
me but a tie supposititious--the full-blown flower of my theory. It
would show here as another flower, equally mature, for me to have made
out a similar dim community between Gilbert Long and Mrs. Brissenden--to
be able to figure them as groping side by side, proportionately, towards
a fellowship of light overtaken; but if I failed of this, for ideal
symmetry, that seemed to rest on the general truth that joy brings
people less together than sorrow.

So much for the course of my impressions while the music lasted--a
course quite consistent with my being prepared for new combinations as
soon as it was over. Promptly, when that happened, the bow was unbent;
and the combination I first seized, amid motion and murmur and rustle,
was that, once more, of poor Briss and Lady John, the latter of whom had
already profited by the general reaction to endeavour to cultivate
afresh the vainest of her sundry appearances. She had laid on him the
same coercive hand to which I owed my having found him with her in the
afternoon, but my intervention was now to operate with less ceremony. I
chanced to be near enough to them for Brissenden, on seeing me, to fix
his eyes on me in silence, but in a manner that could only bring me
immediately nearer. Lady John never did anything in silence, but she
greeted me as I came up to them with a fine false alarm. "No, indeed,"
she cried, "you shan't carry him off this time!"--and poor Briss
disappeared, leaving us face to face, even while she breathed defiance.