tation--all that
was implied in the lesson I had extracted from other portions of the
business. It was distinctly poor she who gave me the lead, and it was
not less definite that she put it to me that I should render her a
service either by remaining with them or by inventing something that
would lure her persecutor away. She desired him, even at the cost of her
being left alone, distracted from his pursuit.

Poor he, in his quarter, I hasten to add, contributed to my picking out
this embroidery nothing more helpful than a sustained detachment. He
said as little as possible, seemed heedless of what was otherwise said,
and only gave me on his own account a look or two of dim suggestiveness.
Yet it was these looks that most told with me, and what they, for their
part, conveyed was a plea that directly contradicted Lady John's. I
understood him that it was he who was bored, he who had been pursued, he
for whom perversity had become a dreadful menace, he, in fine, who
pleaded for my intervention. He was so willing to trust me to relieve
him of his companion that I think he would simply have bolted without
deferring to me if I had not taken my precautions against it. I had, as
it happened, another momentary use for him than this: I wished on the
one hand not to lose him and on the other not to lose Lady John, though
I had quickly enough guessed this brilliant woman's real preference, of
which it in fact soon became my lively wish to see the proof. The union
of these two was too artificial for me not already to have connected
with it the service it might render, in her ladyship's view, to that
undetected cultivation, on her part, of a sentiment for Gilbert Long
which, through his feigned response to it, fitted so completely to the
other pieces in my collection. To see all this was at the time, I
remember, to be as inhumanly amused as if one had found one could create
something. I had created nothing but a clue or two to the larger
comprehension I still needed, yet I positively found myself overtaken by
a mild artistic glow. What had occurred was that, for my full
demonstration, I needed Long, and that, by the same stroke, I became
sure I should certainly get him by temporising a little.

Lady John was in love with him and had kicked up, to save her credit,
the dust of a fictive relation with another man--the relation one of
mere artifice and the man one in her encouragement of whom nobody would
believe. Yet she was also disc