Part 21 (1/2)

”Yes--I wasn't imputing to you the same direct appeal. I didn't suppose,” she explained, ”that--to match your own supposition of _me_--you had resorted to May herself.”

”You didn't suppose I had asked her?” The point was positively that she didn't; yet it made us look at each other almost as hard as if she did.

”No, of course you couldn't have supposed anything so cruel--all the more that, as you knew, I had not admitted the possibility.”

She accepted my a.s.sent; but, oddly enough, with a sudden qualification that showed her as still sharply disposed to make use of any loose sc.r.a.p of her embarra.s.sed acuteness. ”Of course, at the same time, you yourself saw that your not admitting the possibility would have taken the edge from your cruelty. It's not the innocent,” she suggestively remarked, ”that we fear to frighten.”

”Oh,” I returned, ”I fear, mostly, I think, to frighten _any_ one. I'm not particularly brave. I haven't, at all events, in spite of my cert.i.tude, interrogated Mrs. Server, and I give you my word of honour that I've not had any denial from her to prop up my doubt. It still stands on its own feet, and it was its own battle that, when I came here at your summons, it was prepared to fight. Let me accordingly remind you,” I pursued, ”in connection with that, of the one sense in which you were, as you a moment ago said, talked over by me. I persuaded you apparently that Long's metamorphosis was not the work of Lady John. I persuaded you of nothing else.”

She looked down a little, as if again at a trap. ”You persuaded me that it was the work of somebody.” Then she held up her head. ”It came to the same thing.”

If I had credit then for my trap it at least might serve. ”The same thing as what?”

”Why, as claiming that it _was_ she.”

”Poor May--'claiming'? When I insisted it wasn't!”

Mrs. Brissenden flushed. ”You didn't insist it wasn't anybody!”

”Why should I when I didn't believe so? I've left you in no doubt,” I indulgently smiled, ”of my beliefs. It was somebody--and it still is.”

She looked about at the top of the room. ”The mistake's now yours.”

I watched her an instant. ”Can you tell me then what one does to recover from such mistakes?”

”One thinks a little.”

”Ah, the more I've thought the deeper I've sunk! And that seemed to me the case with you this morning,” I added, ”the more _you_ thought.”

”Well, then,” she frankly declared, ”I must have stopped thinking!”

It was a phenomenon, I sufficiently showed, that thought only could meet. ”Could you tell me then at what point?”

She had to think even to do that. ”At what point?”

”What in particular determined, I mean, your arrest? You surely didn't--launched as you were--stop short all of yourself.”

She fronted me, after all, still so bravely that I believed her for an instant not to be, on this article, without an answer she could produce.

The unexpected therefore broke for me when she fairly produced none. ”I confess I don't make out,” she simply said, ”while you seem so little pleased that I agree with you.”

I threw back, in despair, both head and hands. ”But, you poor, dear thing, you don't in the _least_ agree with me! You flatly contradict me.

You deny my miracle.”

”I don't believe in miracles,” she panted.

”So I exactly, at this late hour, learn. But I don't insist on the name. Nothing _is_, I admit, a miracle from the moment one's on the track of the cause, which was the scent we were following. Call the thing simply my fact.”

She gave her high head a toss. ”If it's yours it's n.o.body else's!”

”Ah, there's just the question--if we could know all! But my point is precisely, for the present, that you do deny it.”