-but she
had recovered herself enough to laugh. "I should have thought he had had
more than his turn!" She had recovered herself in fact much more than I;
for somehow, from this instant, convinced as she had been and turning
everything to her conviction, I found myself dealing, in thought, with
still larger material. It was odd what a difference was made for me by
the renewed sight of dear Guy. I didn't of course analyse this sense at
the time; that was still to come. Our friends meanwhile had noticed us,
and something clearly passed between them--it almost produced, for an
instant, a visible arrest in their advance--on the question of their
having perhaps been for some time exposed.

They came on, however, and I waved them from afar a greeting, to which
Mrs. Server alone replied. Distances were great at Newmarch and
landscape-gardening on the grand scale; it would take them still some
minutes to reach our place of vantage or to arrive within sound of
speech. There was accordingly nothing marked in our turning away and
strolling back to the house. We had been so intent that we confessed by
this movement to a quick impulse to disown it. Yet it was remarkable
that, before we went in, Mrs. Brissenden should have struck me afresh as
having got all she wanted. Her recovery from our surprise was already so
complete that her high lucidity now alone reigned. "You don't require, I
suppose, anything more than _that_?"

"Well, I don't quite see, I'm bound to say, just where even 'that' comes
in." It incommoded me singularly little, at the point to which I had
jumped, that this statement was the exact reverse of the truth. Where it
came in was what I happened to be in the very act of seeing--seeing to
the exclusion of almost everything else. It was sufficient that I might
perhaps feel myself to have done at last with Mrs. Brissenden. I
desired, at all events, quite as if this benefit were assured me, to
leave her the honours of the last word.

She was finely enough prepared to take them. "Why, this invention of
using my husband----!" She fairly gasped at having to explain.

"Of 'using' him?"

"Trailing him across the scent as she does all of you, one after the
other. Excuse my comparing you to so many red herrings. You each have
your turn; only _his_ seems repeated, poor dear, till he's quite worn
out with it."

I kept for a little this image in my eye. "I can see of course that his
whole situation must be something of a str