moment admitted. "I did have, last night, my
scruples, but you warm me up. Yet I confess also," I still added, "that
if I do muster the courage of my curiosity, it's a little because I feel
even yet, as I think you also must, altogether destitute of a material
clue. If I had a material clue I should feel ashamed: the fact would be
deterrent. I start, for my part, at any rate, quite in the dark--or in a
darkness lighted, at best, by what you have called the torch of my
analogy. The analogy too," I wound up, "may very well be only half a
help. It was easy to find poor Briss, because poor Briss is here, and
it's always easy, moreover, to find a husband. But say Mrs. Server's
poor Briss--or his equivalent, whoever it may be--_isn't_ here."

We had begun to walk away with this, but my companion pulled up at the
door of the room. "I'm sure he is. She tells me he's near."

"'Tells' you?" I challenged it, but I uncomfortably reflected that it
was just what I had myself told Mrs. Brissenden.

"She wouldn't be as she is if he weren't. Her being as she is is the
sign of it. He wasn't present--that is he wasn't present in her life at
all--when I painted her; and the difference we're impressed with is
exactly the proof that he is now."

My difficulty in profiting by the relief he had so unconsciously
afforded me resided of course in my not feeling free to show for quite
as impressed as he was. I hadn't really made out at all what he was
impressed _with_, and I should only have spoiled everything by inviting
him to be definite. This was a little of a worry, for I should have
liked to know; but on the other hand I felt my track at present
effectually covered. "Well, then, grant he's one of us. There are more
than a dozen of us--a dozen even with you and me and Brissenden counted
out. The hitch is that we're nowhere without a primary lead. As to
Brissenden there _was_ the lead."

"You mean as afforded by his wife's bloated state, which was a
signal----?"

"Precisely: for the search for something or other that would help to
explain it. Given his wife's bloated state, his own shrunken one was
what was to have been predicated. I knew definitely, in other words,
what to look for."

"Whereas we don't know here?"

"Mrs. Server's state, unfortunately," I replied, "is not bloated."

He laughed at my "unfortunately," though recognising that I spoke merely
from the point of view of lucidity, and presently remarked that he had
his own