my refreshed intensity, by the help of confusedly
lighting another cigarette, which I should have no time to smoke. "I
should have thought," my friend continued, "that he too might have
changed back."

I took in, for myself, so much more of it than I could say! "Certainly.
You wouldn't have thought he would have changed forward." Then with an
impulse that bridged over an abyss of connections I jumped to another
place. "Was what you most saw while you were there with _her_--was this
that her misery, the misery you first phrased to me, has dropped?"

"Dropped, yes." He was clear about it. "I called her beastly unhappy to
you though I even then knew that beastly unhappiness wasn't quite all
of it. It was part of it, it was enough of it; for she was--well, no
doubt you could tell _me_. Just now, at all events"--and recalling,
reflecting, deciding, he used, with the strongest effect, as he so often
did in painting, the simplest term--"just now she's all right."

"All right?"

He couldn't know how much more than was possible my question gave him to
answer. But he answered it on what he had; he repeated: "All right."

I wondered, in spite of the comfort I took, as I had more than once in
life had occasion to take it before, at the sight of the painter-sense
deeply applied. My wonder came from the fact that Lady John had also
found Mrs. Server all right, and Lady John had a vision as closed as
Obert's was open. It didn't suit my book for both these observers to
have been affected in the same way. "You mean you saw nothing whatever
in her that was the least bit strange?"

"Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than
that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right."

"All there, eh?" I after an instant risked.

I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a
temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an
hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my
nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to
step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all
allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could
only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but
it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that
I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical
lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I