ed to you and
that I can't consent, if you please, to your twisting into the
recognition of anything else. It's the recognition that I know nothing
of any other change. I stick, if you'll allow me, to my ignorance."

"I'll allow you with joy," I laughed, "if you'll let me stick to it
_with_ you. Your own change is quite sufficient--it gives us all we
need. It will give us, if we retrace the steps of it, everything,
everything!"

Mrs. Briss considered. "I don't quite see, do I? why, at this hour of
the night, we should begin to retrace steps."

"Simply because it's the hour of the night you've happened, in your
generosity and your discretion, to choose. I'm struck, I confess," I
declared with a still sharper conviction, "with the wonderful charm of
it for our purpose."

"And, pray, what do you call with such solemnity," she inquired, "our
purpose?"

I had fairly recovered at last--so far from being solemn--an appropriate
gaiety. "I can only, with positiveness, answer for mine! That has
remained all day the same--to get at the truth: not, that is, to relax
my grasp of that tip of the tail of it which you so helped me this
morning to fasten to. If you've ceased to _care_ to help me," I pursued,
"that's a difference indeed. But why," I candidly, pleadingly asked,
"_should_ you cease to care?" It was more and more of a comfort to feel
her imprisoned in her inability really to explain her being there. To
show herself as she was explained it only so far as she could express
that; which was just the freedom she could least take. "What on earth is
between us, anyhow," I insisted, "but our confounded interest? That's
only quickened, for me, don't you see? by the charming way you've come
round; and I don't see how it can logically be anything less than
quickened for yourself. We're like the messengers and heralds in the
tale of Cinderella, and I protest, I assure you, against any sacrifice
of our denoument. We've still the glass shoe to fit."

I took pleasure at the moment in my metaphor; but this was not the
case, I soon enough perceived, with my companion. "How can I tell,
please," she demanded, "what you consider you're talking about?"

I smiled; it was so quite the question Ford Obert, in the smoking-room,
had begun by putting me. I hadn't to take time to remind myself how I
had dealt with _him_. "And you knew," I sighed, "so beautifully, you
glowed over it so, this morning!" She continued to give me, in every
way, he