d of as the identification of the
woman. That call had been what I looked for from her after she had seen
me break with Lady John; my first idea _then_ could only be that I must
come, as it were, to time. It was strange that, the next minute, I
should find myself sure that I was, as I may put it, free; it was at all
events indisputable that as I stood there watching her recede and fairly
studying, in my preoccupation, her handsome affirmative back and the
special sweep of her long dress--it was indisputable that, on some
intimation I could, at the instant, recognise but not seize, my
consciousness was aware of having performed a full revolution. If I was
free, that was what I had been only so short a time before, what I had
been as I drove, in London, to the station. Was this now a foreknowledge
that, on the morrow, in driving away, I should feel myself restored to
that blankness? The state lost was the state of exemption from intense
obsessions, and the state recovered would therefore logically match it.
If the foreknowledge had thus, as by the stir of the air from my
friend's whisk of her train, descended upon me, my liberation was in a
manner what I was already tasting. Yet how I also felt, with it,
something of the threat of a chill to my curiosity! The taste of its
being all over, that really sublime success of the strained vision in
which I had been living for crowded hours--was this a taste that I was
sure I should particularly enjoy? Marked enough it was, doubtless, that
even in the stress of perceiving myself broken with I ruefully reflected
on all the more, on the ever so much, I still wanted to know!

Well, something of this quantity, in any case, would come, since Mrs.
Briss did want to speak to me. The suspense that remained with me, as I
have indicated, was the special fresh one she had just produced. It fed,
for a little, positively, on that survey of her fine retreating person
to which I have confessed that my eyes attached themselves. These
seconds were naturally few, and yet my memory gathers from them
something that I can only compare, in its present effect, to the scent
of a strange flower passed rapidly under my nose. I seem in other words
to recall that I received in that brush the very liveliest impression
that my whole adventure was to yield--the impression that is my reason
for speaking of myself as having at the juncture in question "studied"
Mrs. Brissenden's back. Study of a profound sort woul