en too subtle or
too simple. He had another of his cautions. "What do _you_----?"

But I was determined to make him give it me all himself, for it was
from my not prompting him that its value would come. "You tell me," I
accordingly rather crudely pleaded, "first."

It gave us a moment during which he so looked as if I asked too much,
that I had a fear of losing all. He even spoke with some impatience. "If
you really haven't found it for yourself, you know. I scarce see what
you _can_ have found."

Then I had my inspiration. I risked an approach to roughness, and all
the more easily that my words were strict truth. "Oh, don't be
afraid--greater things than yours!"

It succeeded, for it played upon his curiosity, and he visibly imagined
that, with impatience controlled, he should learn what these things
were. He relaxed, he responded, and the next moment I was in all but
full enjoyment of the piece wanted to make all my other pieces
right--right because of that special beauty in my scheme through which
the whole depended so on each part and each part so guaranteed the
whole. "What I call the light of day is the sense I've arrived at of her
vision."

"Her vision?"--I just balanced in the air.

"Of what they have in common. _His_--poor chap's--extraordinary
situation too."

"Bravo! And you see in that----?"

"What, all these hours, has touched, fascinated, drawn her. It has been
an instinct with her."

"Bravissimo!"

It saw him, my approval, safely into port. "The instinct of sympathy,
pity--the response to fellowship in misery; the sight of another fate as
strange, as monstrous as her own."

I couldn't help jumping straight up--I stood before him. "So that
whoever may have _been_ the man, the man _now_, the actual man----"

"Oh," said Obert, looking, luminous and straight, up at me from his
seat, "the man now, the actual man----!" But he stopped short, with his
eyes suddenly quitting me and his words becoming a formless ejaculation.
The door of the room, to which my back was turned, had opened, and I
quickly looked round. It was Brissenden himself who, to my supreme
surprise, stood there, with rapid inquiry in his attitude and face. I
saw, as soon as he caught mine, that I was what he wanted, and,
immediately excusing myself for an instant to Obert, I anticipated, by
moving across the room, the need, on poor Briss's part, of my further
demonstration. My whole sense of the situation blazed up at the touch o