me for catechising her; she couldn't afford not
to have kept, in her way, faith with me; she couldn't afford, after
inconceivable passages with Long, not to treat me as an observer to be
squared. She had come down to square me; she was hanging on to square
me; she was suffering and stammering and lying; she was both carrying it
grandly off and letting it desperately go: all, all to square me. And I
caught moreover perfectly her vision of her way, and I followed her way
even while I judged it, feeling that the only personal privilege I
could, after all, save from the whole business was that of
understanding. I couldn't save Mrs. Server, and I couldn't save poor
Briss; I _could_, however, guard, to the last grain of gold, my precious
sense of their loss, their disintegration and their doom; and it was for
this I was now bargaining.

It was of giving herself away just enough not to spoil for me my bargain
over my treasure that Mrs. Briss's bribe would consist. She would let me
see as far as I would if she could feel sure I would _do_ nothing; and
it was exactly in this question of how much I might have scared my
couple into the sense I _could_ "do" that the savour of my suspense most
dwelt. I could have made them uneasy, of course, only by making them
fear my intervention; and yet the idea of their being uneasy was less
wonderful than the idea of my having, with all my precautions,
communicated to them a consciousness. This was so the last thing I had
wanted to do that I felt, during my swift excursion, how much time I
should need in the future for recovery of the process--all of the finest
wind-blown intimations, woven of silence and secrecy and air--by which
their suspicion would have throbbed into life. I could only,
provisionally and sketchily, figure it out, this suspicion, as having,
little by little--not with a sudden start--felt itself in the presence
of my own, just as my own now returned the compliment. What came back to
me, as I have said, in waves and wider glimpses, was the marvel of their
exchange of signals, the phenomenon, scarce to be represented, of their
breaking ground with each other. They both had their treasure to guard,
and they had looked to each other with the instinct of help. They had
felt, on either side, the victim possibly slip, and they had connected
the possibility with an interest discernibly inspired in me by this
personage, and with a relation discoverably established by that
interest. I