ld 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 ta