e that, when I came here
at your summons, it was prepared to fight. Let me accordingly remind
you," I pursued, "in connection with that, of the one sense in which you
were, as you a moment ago said, talked over by me. I persuaded you
apparently that Long's metamorphosis was not the work of Lady John. I
persuaded you of nothing else."

She looked down a little, as if again at a trap. "You persuaded me that
it was the work of somebody." Then she held up her head. "It came to the
same thing."

If I had credit then for my trap it at least might serve. "The same
thing as what?"

"Why, as claiming that it _was_ she."

"Poor May--'claiming'? When I insisted it wasn't!"

Mrs. Brissenden flushed. "You didn't insist it wasn't anybody!"

"Why should I when I didn't believe so? I've left you in no doubt," I
indulgently smiled, "of my beliefs. It was somebody--and it still is."

She looked about at the top of the room. "The mistake's now yours."

I watched her an instant. "Can you tell me then what one does to recover
from such mistakes?"

"One thinks a little."

"Ah, the more I've thought the deeper I've sunk! And that seemed to me
the case with you this morning," I added, "the more _you_ thought."

"Well, then," she frankly declared, "I must have stopped thinking!"

It was a phenomenon, I sufficiently showed, that thought only could
meet. "Could you tell me then at what point?"

She had to think even to do that. "At what point?"

"What in particular determined, I mean, your arrest? You surely
didn't--launched as you were--stop short all of yourself."

She fronted me, after all, still so bravely that I believed her for an
instant not to be, on this article, without an answer she could produce.
The unexpected therefore broke for me when she fairly produced none. "I
confess I don't make out," she simply said, "while you seem so little
pleased that I agree with you."

I threw back, in despair, both head and hands. "But, you poor, dear
thing, you don't in the _least_ agree with me! You flatly contradict me.
You deny my miracle."

"I don't believe in miracles," she panted.

"So I exactly, at this late hour, learn. But I don't insist on the
name. Nothing _is_, I admit, a miracle from the moment one's on the
track of the cause, which was the scent we were following. Call the
thing simply my fact."

She gave her high head a toss. "If it's yours it's nobody else's!"

"Ah, there's just the question--if we could know