I was at sea. ""Knew"? But you saw."
"I knew--that is I learnt--more than I saw. I knew she couldn"t be gone."
It in fact brought light. "Knew it by _him_?"
"He told me," said Mrs. Briss.
It brought light, but it brought also, I fear, for me, another queer grimace. "Does he then regularly tell?"
"Regularly. But what he tells," she did herself the justice to declare, "is not always so much to the point as the two things I"ve repeated to you."
Their weight then suggested that I should have them over again. "His revelation, in the first place, of Long and Lady John?"
"And his revelation in the second"--she spoke of it as a broad joke--"of May Server and himself."
There was something in her joke that was a chill to my mind; but I nevertheless played up. "And what does he say that"s further interesting about _that_?"
"Why, that she"s awfully sharp."
I gasped--she turned it out so. "_She_--Mrs. Server?"
It made her, however, equally stare. "Why, isn"t it the very thing you maintained?"
I felt her dreadful logic, but I couldn"t--with my exquisite image all contrasted, as in a flash from flint, with this monstrosity--so much as entertain her question. I could only stupidly again sound it. "Awfully sharp?"
"You after all then now don"t?" It was she herself whom the words at present described! "Then what on earth _do_ you think?" The strange mixture in my face naturally made her ask it, but everything, within a minute, had somehow so given way under the touch of her supreme a.s.surance, the presentation of her own now finished system, that I dare say I couldn"t at the moment have in the least trusted myself to tell her. She left me, however, in fact, small time--she only took enough, with her negations arrayed and her insolence recaptured, to judge me afresh, which she did as she gathered herself up into the strength of twenty-five. I didn"t after all--it appeared part of my smash--know the weight of her husband"s years, but I knew the weight of my own. They might have been a thousand, and nothing but the sense of them would in a moment, I saw, be left me. "My poor dear, you _are_ crazy, and I bid you good-night!"
Nothing but the sense of them--on my taking it from her without a sound and watching her, through the lighted rooms, retreat and disappear--_was_ at first left me; but after a minute something else came, and I grew conscious that her verdict lingered. She had so had the last word that, to get out of its planted presence, I shook myself, as I had done before, from my thought. When once I had started to my room indeed--and to preparation for a livelier start as soon as the house should stir again--I almost breathlessly hurried. Such a last word--the word that put me altogether nowhere--was too unacceptable not to prescribe afresh that prompt test of escape to other air for which I had earlier in the evening seen so much reason. I _should_ certainly never again, on the spot, quite hang together, even though it wasn"t really that I hadn"t three times her method. What I too fatally lacked was her tone.
THE END