stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other
hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of
this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I
mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he
had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to
call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that
he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the
least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end
without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was
the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling
an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this
fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her
change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the
one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw
him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept
clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of
his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all
right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would
be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short,
for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself
was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be
amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt
himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished
to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed
to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the
smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and
_was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs.
Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I
talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given
me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile
come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!"

That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy;
but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so
clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an
explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his
wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was