u agree that it's not she----?" Then, as she again waited, "It's
_you_ who've come round?" I insisted.

"To your doubt of its being May? Yes--I've come round."

"Ah, pardon me," I returned; "what I expressed this morning was, if I
remember rightly, not at all a 'doubt,' but a positive, intimate
conviction that was inconsistent with _any_ doubt. I was
emphatic--purely and simply--that I didn't see it."

She looked, however, as if she caught me in a weakness here. "Then why
did you say to me that if you should reconsider----"

"You should handsomely have it from me, and my grounds? Why, as I've
just reminded you, as a form of courtesy to you--magnanimously to help
you, as it were, to feel as comfortable as I conceived you naturally
would desire to feel in your own conviction. Only for that. And now," I
smiled, "I'm to understand from you that, in spite of that immense
allowance, you _haven't_, all this while, felt comfortable?"

She gave, on this, in a wonderful, beautiful way, a slow, simplifying
headshake. "Mrs. Server isn't in it!"

The only way then to take it from her was that her concession was a
prelude to something still better; and when I had given her time to see
this dawn upon me I had my eagerness and I jumped into the breathless.
"You've made out then who _is_?"

"Oh, I don't make out, you know," she laughed, "so much as you! _She_
isn't," she simply repeated.

I looked at it, on my inspiration, quite ruefully--almost as if I now
wished, after all, she were. "Ah, but, do you know? it really strikes me
you make out marvels. You made out this morning quite what I couldn't. I
hadn't put together anything so extraordinary as that--in the total
absence of everything--it _should_ have been our friend."

Mrs. Briss appeared, on her side, to take in the intention of this.
"What do you mean by the total absence? When I made my mistake," she
declared as if in the interest of her dignity, "I didn't think
everything absent."

"I see," I admitted. "I see," I thoughtfully repeated. "And do you,
then, think everything now?"

"I had my honest impression of the moment," she pursued as if she had
not heard me. "There were appearances that, as it at the time struck me,
fitted."

"Precisely"--and I recalled for her the one she had made most of. "There
was in especial the appearance that she was at a particular moment using
Brissenden to show whom she was not using. You felt _then_," I ventured
to observe, "the for