r disconnection from this morning, so that I had only to proceed:
"You've not availed yourself of this occasion to pretend to me that poor
Mr. Long, as you call him, is, after all, the same limited person----"

"That he always was, and that you, yesterday, so suddenly discovered him
to have ceased to be?"--for with this she had waked up. But she was
still thinking how she could turn it. "You see too much."

"Oh, I know I do--ever so much too much. And much as I see, I express
only half of it--so you may judge!" I laughed. "But what will you have?
I see what I see, and this morning, for a good bit, you did me the
honour to do the same. I returned, also, the compliment, didn't I? by
seeing something of what _you_ saw. We put it, the whole thing,
together, and we shook the bottle hard. I'm to take from you, after
this," I wound up, "that what it contains is a perfectly colourless
fluid?"

I paused for a reply, but it was not to come so happily as from Obert.
"You talk too much!" said Mrs. Briss.

I met it with amazement. "Why, whom have I told?"

I looked at her so hard with it that her colour began to rise, which
made me promptly feel that she wouldn't press that point. "I mean you're
carried away--you're abused by a fine fancy: so that, with your art of
putting things, one doesn't know where one is--nor, if you'll allow me
to say so, do I quite think _you_ always do. Of course I don't deny
you're awfully clever. But you build up," she brought out with a regret
so indulgent and a reluctance so marked that she for some seconds fairly
held the blow--"you build up houses of cards."

I had been impatient to learn what, and, frankly, I was disappointed.
This broke from me, after an instant, doubtless, with a bitterness not
to be mistaken. "Long _isn't_ what he seems?"

"Seems to whom?" she asked sturdily.

"Well, call it--for simplicity--to _me_. For you see"--and I spoke as to
show _what_ it was to see--"it all stands or falls by that."

The explanation presently appeared a little to have softened her. If it
all stood or fell only by _that_, it stood or fell by something that,
for her comfort, might be not so unsuccessfully disposed of. She
exhaled, with the swell of her fine person, a comparative
blandness--seemed to play with the idea of a smile. She had, in short,
her own explanation. "The trouble with you is that you over-estimate the
penetration of others. How can it approach your own?"

"Well, yours had for a