what.
But I kept it under. "I seem to snuff up----"

"_Quoi donc?_"

"The sense of a discovery to be made."

"And of what?"

"I'll tell you to-morrow. Good-night."

III

I did on the morrow several things, but the first was not to redeem that
vow. It was to address myself straight to Grace Brissenden. "I must let
you know that, in spite of your guarantee, it doesn't go at all--oh, but
not at all! I've tried Lady John, as you enjoined, and I can't but feel
that she leaves us very much where we were." Then, as my listener seemed
not quite to remember where we had been, I came to her help. "You said
yesterday at Paddington, to explain the change in Gilbert Long--don't
you recall?--that that woman, plying him with her genius and giving him
of her best, is clever enough for two. She's not clever enough then, it
strikes me, for three--or at any rate for four. I confess I don't see
it. Does she really dazzle _you_?"

My friend had caught up. "Oh, you've a standard of wit!"

"No, I've only a sense of reality--a sense not at all satisfied by the
theory of such an influence as Lady John's."

She wondered. "Such a one as whose else then?"

"Ah, that's for us still to find out! Of course this can't be easy; for
as the appearance is inevitably a kind of betrayal, it's in somebody's
interest to conceal it."

This Mrs. Brissenden grasped. "Oh, you mean in the lady's?"

"In the lady's most. But also in Long's own, if he's really tender of
the lady--which is precisely what our theory posits."

My companion, once roused, was all there. "I see. You call the
appearance a kind of betrayal because it points to the relation behind
it."

"Precisely."

"And the relation--to do that sort of thing--must be necessarily so
awfully intimate."

"_Intimissima._"

"And kept therefore in the background exactly in that proportion."

"Exactly in that proportion."

"Very well then," said Mrs. Brissenden, "doesn't Mr. Long's tenderness
of Lady John quite fall in with what I mentioned to you?"

I remembered what she had mentioned to me. "His making her come down
with poor Briss?"

"Nothing less."

"And is that all you go upon?"

"That and lots more."

I thought a minute--but I had been abundantly thinking. "I know what you
mean by 'lots.' Is Brissenden in it?"

"Dear no--poor Briss! He wouldn't like that. _I_ saw the manoeuvre,
but Guy didn't. And you must have noticed how he stuck to her all last
evening."

"How