, hardly; and that's why,
as you so acutely see, the question of your having risked such a step
has occurred to me only as a jest. Fancy indeed"--I piled it up--"your
saying to him: 'We're all noticing that you're so much less of an idiot
than you used to be, and we've different views of the miracle'!"

I had been going on, but I was checked without a word from her. Her look
alone did it, for, though it was a look that partly spoiled her lie,
it--by that very fact--sufficed to my confidence. "I've not spoken to a
creature."

It was beautifully said, but I felt again the abysses that the mere
saying of it covered, and the sense of these wonderful things was not a
little, no doubt, in my immediate cheer. "Ah, then, we're all right!" I
could have rubbed my hands over it. "I mean, however," I quickly added,
"only as far as that. I don't at all feel comfortable about your new
theory itself, which puts me so wretchedly in the wrong."

"Rather!" said Mrs. Briss almost gaily. "Wretchedly indeed in the
wrong!"

"Yet only--equally of course," I returned after a brief brooding, "if I
come within a conceivability of accepting it. Are you conscious that, in
default of Long's own word--equivocal as that word would be--you press
it upon me without the least other guarantee?"

"And pray," she asked, "what guarantee had _you_?"

"For the theory with which we started? Why, our recognised fact. The
change in the man. You may say," I pursued, "that I was the first to
speak for him; but being the first didn't, in your view, constitute a
weakness when it came to your speaking yourself for Mrs. Server. By
which I mean," I added, "speaking against her."

She remembered, but not for my benefit. "Well, you then asked me _my_
warrant. And as regards Mr. Long and your speaking against _him_----"

"Do you describe what I say as 'against' him?" I immediately broke in.

It took her but an instant. "Surely--to have made him out horrid."

I could only want to fix it. "'Horrid'----?"

"Why, having such secrets." She was roundly ready now. "Sacrificing poor
May."

"But _you_, dear lady, sacrificed poor May! It didn't strike you as
horrid _then_."

"Well, that was only," she maintained, "because you talked me over."

I let her see the full process of my taking--or not taking--this in.
"And who is it then that--if, as you say, you've spoken to no one--has,
as I may call it, talked you under?"

She completed, on the spot, her statement of