or danger, her fall from an unmanageable horse or the crack
beneath her of thin ice. It was impossible--that was the extraordinary
impression--to come too much to her assistance. We had each of us all,
in our way, hour after hour, been, as goodnaturedly as unwittingly,
giving her a lift; yet what was the end of it but her still sitting
there to assure me of a state of gratitude--that she couldn't even
articulate--for every hint of a perch that might still be held out?
What could only, therefore, in the connection, strike me as indicated
was fairly to put into her mouth--if one might do so without showing too
ungracefully as alarmed--the words one might have guessed her to wish to
use were she able to use any. It was a small service of anticipation
that I tried to render her with as little of an air as possible of being
remedial. "I daresay you wonder," I remarked on these lines, "why, at
all, I should have thrust Brissenden in."

"Oh, I _do_ so wonder!" she replied with the refined but exaggerated
glee that is a frequent form in high companies and light colloquies. I
_did_ help her--it was admirable to feel it. She liked my imposing on
her no more complex a proposition. She liked my putting the thing to her
so much better than she could have put it to me. But she immediately
afterwards looked away as if--now that we _had_ put it, and it didn't
matter which of us best--we had nothing more to do with it. She gave me
a hint of drops and inconsequences that might indeed have opened up
abysses, and all the while she smiled and smiled. Yet whatever she did
or failed of, as I even then observed to myself, how she remained
lovely! One's pleasure in that helped one somehow not to break down on
one's own side--since breaking down was in question--for commiseration.
I didn't know what she might have hours of for the man--whoever he
was--to whom her sacrifice had been made; but I doubted if for any other
person she had ever been so beautiful as she was for me at these
moments. To have kept her so, to have made her more so--how might that
result of their relation not in fact have shone as a blinding light into
the eyes of her lover? What would he have been bound to make out in her
after all but her passion and her beauty? Wasn't it enough for such
wonders as these to fill his consciousness? If they didn't fill
mine--even though occupying so large a place in it--was that not only
because I had not the direct benefit of them as the ot