her cleverness that held
you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?"

He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I
wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to
know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had
given her away to you, you know, rather, before."

"And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?"

He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then
he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all
there."

"I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an
instant to turn away.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"To do what Brissenden came to me for."

"But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for."

"Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she
gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather
awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at
her request, was to say she does venture."

My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?"

"Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part
of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of
yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it
_is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault."

Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder.
"And--a--where is it then you meet?"

"Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night."

He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification,
little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The
household sits up for you?"

I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the
household! And it won't probably take us very long."

His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity.
The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his
ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with
her----?"

"My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't
you see?--who proposes."

"But what in the world----?"

"Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you."

"With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to
say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to
say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted
with being quite sure of me. "W