han her own. Hadn't I possibly
burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her
back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her
firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a
complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't
fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had,
in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as
worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she
knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with
everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at
all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp.

But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to
wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not
altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you
understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't
quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the
going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to
the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this
putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I
had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was
hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very
last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my
own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about
still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks
round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could.
I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us
together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds
us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for
that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_
gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and
_I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded,
talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had
meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure,
behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she
didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was
most in her mind. We had indeed taken a j