lay
to assure myself, performing in the opposite sense the journey I had
made ten minutes before. It was extraordinary what the sight of Long
alone in the outer darkness had done for me: my expression of it would
have been that it had put me "on" again at the moment of my decidedly
feeling myself off. I believed that if I hadn't seen him I could now
have gone to bed without seeing Mrs. Briss; but my renewed impression
had suddenly made the difference. If that was the way he struck me, how
might not, if I could get at her, she? And she might, after all, in the
privacy at last offered us by empty rooms, be waiting for me. I went
through them all, however, only to find them empty indeed. In conformity
with the large allowances of every sort that were the law of Newmarch,
they were still open and lighted, so that if I had believed in Mrs.
Briss's reappearance I might conveniently, on the spot, have given her
five minutes more. I am not sure, for that matter, that I didn't. I
remember at least wondering if I mightn't ring somewhere for a servant
and cause a question to be sent up to her. I didn't ring, but I must
have lingered a little on the chance of the arrival of servants to
extinguish lights and see the house safe. They had not arrived, however,
by the time I again felt that I must give up.

XI

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,