Deep is the rest of feeling with you, in this way, that I'm watched, for the time, only as you watch me.It has all stopped, and i can stop.How can I make you understand what it is for me that there isn't at last a creature any more in sight, that the wood darkens about me, that the sounds drop and the relief goes on; what can it mean for you even that I've given myself up to not caring whether or no, amongst others, I'm missed and spoken of? It does help my strange case, in fine, as you see, to let you keep me here; but I should have found still more what I was in need of if Ihad only found, instead of you, him whom I had in mind.He is as much better than you as you are than everyone else." I finally felt, in a word, so qualified to attribute to my companion some such mute address as that, that it could only have, as the next consequence, a determining effect on me--an effect under the influence of which I spoke."I parted with him, some way from here, some time ago.I had found him in one of the gardens with Lady John; after which we came away from her together.We strolled a little and talked, but I knew what he really wanted.He wanted to find you, and I told him he would probably do so at tea on the terrace.It was visibly with that idea--to return to the house--that he left me."She looked at me for some time on this, taking it in, yet still afraid of it."You found him with Lady John?" she at last asked, and with a note in her voice that made me see what--as there was a precaution I had neglected--she feared.
The perception of this, in its turn, operated with me for an instant almost as the rarest of temptations.I had puzzled out everything and put everything together; I was as morally confident and as intellectually triumphant as I have frankly here described myself; but there was no objective test to which I had yet exposed my theory.The chance to apply one--and it would be infallible--had suddenly cropped up.There would be excitement, amusement, discernment in it; it would be indeed but a more roundabout expression of interest and sympathy.It would, above all, pack the question I had for so many hours been occupied with into the compass of a needle-point.
I was dazzled by my opportunity.She had had an uncertainty, in other words, as to whom I meant, and that it kept her for some seconds on the rack was a trifle compared to my chance.She would give herself away supremely if she showed she suspected me of placing my finger on the spot--if she understood the person I had not named to be nameable as Gilbert Long.What had created her peril, of course, was my naming Lady John.Well, how can I say in any sufficient way how much the extraordinary beauty of her eyes during this brevity of suspense had to do with the event? It had everything--for it was what caused me to be touched beyond even what I had already been, and I could literally bear no more of that.I therefore took no advantage, or took only the advantage I had spoken with the intention of taking.Ilaughed out doubtless too nervously, but it didn't compromise my tact.
"Don't you know how she's perpetually pouncing on him?"Still, however, I had not named him--which was what prolonged the tension.
"Do you mean--a--do you mean?" With which she broke off on a small weak titter and a still weaker exclamation."There are so MANY gentlemen!"There was something in it that might in other conditions have been as trivial as the giggle of a housemaid; but it had in fact for my ear the silver ring of poetry.I told her instantly whom I meant."Poor Briss, you know," I said, "is always in her clutches."Oh, how it let her off! And yet, no sooner had it done so and had Ithereby tasted on the instant the sweetness of my wisdom, than I became aware of something much more extraordinary.It let her off--she showed me this for a minute, in spite of herself; but the next minute she showed me something quite different, which was, most wonderful of all, that she wished me to see her as not quite feeling why I should so much take for granted the person I HAD named."Poor Briss?" her face and manner appeared suddenly to repeat--quite, moreover (and it was the drollest, saddest part), as if all our friends had stood about us to listen.Wherein did poor Briss so intimately concern her? What, pray, was my ground for such free reference to poor Briss? She quite repudiated poor Briss.She knew nothing at all about him, and the whole airy structure I had erected with his aid might have crumbled at the touch she thus administered if its solidity had depended only on that.I had a minute of surprise which, had it lasted another minute as surprise pure and simple, might almost as quickly have turned to something like chagrin.Fortunately it turned instead into something even more like enthusiasm than anything I had yet felt.The stroke WAS extraordinary, but extraordinary for its nobleness.I quickly saw in it, from the moment I had got my point of view, more fine things than ever.I saw for instance that, magnificently, she wished not to incriminate him.All that had passed between us had passed in silence, but it was a different matter for what might pass in sound.We looked at each other therefore with a strained smile over any question of identities.It was as if it had been one thing--to her confused, relaxed intensity--to give herself up to me, but quite another thing to give up somebody else.
