ught a little. "Why, isn't it simply a matter rather of the
renunciation of a confidence?"

"In your sense and your truth?" This, she indicated, was all she asked.
"Well, what is that but everything?"

"Perhaps," I reflected, "perhaps." In fact, it no doubt was. "We'll take
it then for everything, and it's as so taking it that I renounce. I
keep nothing at all. Now do you believe I'm honest?"

She hesitated. "Well--yes, if you say so."

"Ah," I sighed, "I see you don't! What can I do," I asked, "to prove
it?"

"You can easily prove it. You can let me go."

"Does it strike you," I considered, "that I should take your going as a
sign of your belief?"

"Of what else, then?"

"Why, surely," I promptly replied, "my assent to your leaving our
discussion where it stands would constitute a very different symptom.
Wouldn't it much rather represent," I inquired, "a failure of belief on
my own part in _your_ honesty? If you can judge me, in short, as only
pretending----"

"Why shouldn't you," she put in for me, "also judge _me_? What have I to
gain by pretending?"

"I'll tell you," I returned, laughing, "if you'll tell me what _I_
have."

She appeared to ask herself if she could, and then to decide in the
negative. "If I don't understand you in any way, of course I don't in
that. Put it, at any rate," she now rather wearily quavered, "that one
of us has as little to gain as the other. I believe you," she repeated.
"There!"

"Thanks," I smiled, "for the way you say it. If you don't, as you say,
understand me," I insisted, "it's because you think me crazy. And if you
think me crazy I don't see how you _can_ leave me."

She presently met this. "If I believe you're sincere in saying you give
up I believe you've recovered. And if I believe you've recovered I don't
think you crazy. It's simple enough."

"Then why isn't it simple to understand me?"

She turned about, and there were moments in her embarrassment, now, from
which she fairly drew beauty. Her awkwardness was somehow noble; her
sense of her predicament was in itself young. "Is it _ever_?" she
charmingly threw out.

I felt she must see at this juncture how wonderful I found her, and even
that that impression--one's whole consciousness of her personal
victory--was a force that, in the last resort, was all on her side. "It
was quite worth your while, this sitting up to this hour, to show a
fellow how you bloom when other women are fagged. If that was really,