ell, it will make a lot, really----!" But
he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know
more than I!"

"And haven't I admitted that?"

"I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all
answer, now produced.

He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me
for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what
I shall perhaps now learn."

"You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?"

His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen
sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance
he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a
misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a
conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it
immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our
whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this
erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course,
at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the
innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile,
rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way
of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was
temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!"

He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----"

"That," I declared, "will be luminous."

He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she
denies?"

"The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure
impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server.

XII

I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my
previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs.
Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it,
with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a
table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about
that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they
said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite
rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that
she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her
renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the
nature of this effort by striking me as already part o