ld me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but
instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had
lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting
it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I
had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether
my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much
had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any
new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the
old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had
given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my
desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at
least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in
these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that
Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I
none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and
with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the
morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady
herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that
there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How
then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on
which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had
come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair
together--really together--even for three minutes, I would, I sincerely
considered, have come round. But I was to have performed this
revolution on nothing less, as I now went on to explain to her. "Of
course if you've got new evidence I shall be delighted to hear it; and
of course I can't help wondering whether the possession of it and the
desire to overwhelm me with it aren't, together, the one thing you've
been nursing till now."

Oh, how intensely she didn't like such a tone! If she hadn't looked so
handsome I would say she made a wry face over it, though I didn't even
yet see where her dislike would make her come out. Before she came out,
in fact, she waited as if it were a question of dashing her head at a
wall. Then, at last, she charged. "It's nonsense. I've nothing to tell
you. I feel there's nothing in it and I've given it up."

I almost gaped--by which I mean that I looked as if I did--for surprise.
"Yo