pursued at this high pitch and pressure,
"there's no doubt whatever I _am_."

"I'm delighted to hear it," I cried, "for it was exactly something
strong I wanted of you!"

"It _is_ then strong"--and I could see indeed she was ready to satisfy
me. "You've worried me for my motive and harassed me for my 'moment,'
and I've had to protect others and, at the cost of a decent appearance,
to pretend to be myself half an idiot. I've had even, for the same
purpose--if you must have it--to depart from the truth; to give you,
that is, a false account of the manner of my escape from your tangle.
But now the truth shall be told, and others can take care of
themselves!" She had so wound herself up with this, reached so the point
of fairly heaving with courage and candour, that I for an instant almost
miscalculated her direction and believed she was really throwing up her
cards. It was as if she had decided, on some still finer lines, just to
rub my nose into what I had been spelling out; which would have been an
anticipation of my own journey's crown of the most disconcerting sort. I
wanted my personal confidence, but I wanted nobody's confession, and
without the journey's crown where _was_ the personal confidence? Without
the personal confidence, moreover, where was the personal honour? That
would be really the single thing to which I could attach authority, for
a confession might, after all, be itself a lie. Anybody, at all events,
could fit the shoe to one. My friend's intention, however, remained but
briefly equivocal; my danger passed, and I recognised in its place a
still richer assurance. It was not the unnamed, in short, who were to be
named. "Lady John _is_ the woman."

Yet even this was prodigious. "But I thought your present position was
just that she's _not_!"

"Lady John _is_ the woman," Mrs. Briss again announced.

"But I thought your present position was just that nobody is!"

"Lady John _is_ the woman," she a third time declared.

It naturally left me gaping. "Then there _is_ one?" I cried between
bewilderment and joy.

"A woman? There's _her_!" Mrs. Briss replied with more force than
grammar. "I know," she briskly, almost breezily added, "that I said she
wouldn't do (as I had originally said she would do better than any one),
when you a while ago mentioned her. But that was to save her."

"And you don't care now," I smiled, "if she's lost!"

She hesitated. "She _is_ lost. But she can take care of herself."