r. Oh, how I made it out that if it was indeed
very well for the poor lady to feel thus in _my_ company that her burden
was lifted, my company would be after all but a rough substitute for
Guy's! He was a still better friend, little as he could have told the
reason; and if I could in this connection have put the words into her
mouth, here follows something of the sense that I should have made them
form.

"Yes, my dear man, I do understand you--quite perfectly now, and (by I
know not what miracle) I've really done so to some extent from the
first. 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 I had 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