another matter;
and what he had, at any rate, quite taken the affair for was the sort of
flirtation in which, if one is a friend to either party, and one's own
feelings are not at stake, one may now and then give people a lift.
Haven't I asked you before," she demanded, "if you suppose he would have
given one had he had an idea where these people _are_?"

"I scarce know what you have asked me before!" I sighed; "and 'where
they are' is just what you haven't told me."

"It's where my husband was so annoyed unmistakably to discover them."
And as if she had quite fixed the point she passed to another. "He's
peculiar, dear old Briss, but in a way by which, if one uses him--by
which, I mean, if one depends on him--at all, one gains, I think, more
than one loses. Up to a certain point, in any case that's the least a
case for subtlety, he sees nothing at all; but beyond it--when once he
does wake up--he'll go through a house. Nothing then escapes him, and
what he drags to light is sometimes appalling."

"Rather," I thoughtfully responded--"since witness this occasion!"

"But isn't the interest of this occasion, as I've already suggested,"
she propounded, "simply that it makes an end, bursts a bubble, rids us
of an incubus and permits us to go to bed in peace? I thank God," she
moralised, "for dear old Briss to-night."

"So do I," I after a moment returned; "but I shall do so with still
greater fervour if you'll have for the space of another question a still
greater patience." With which, as a final movement from her seemed to
say how much this was to ask, I had on my own side a certain
exasperation of soreness for all I had to acknowledge--even were it mere
acknowledgment--that she had brought rattling down. "Remember," I
pleaded, "that you're costing me a perfect palace of thought!"

I could see too that, held unexpectedly by something in my tone, she
really took it in. Couldn't I even almost see that, for an odd instant,
she regretted the blighted pleasure of the pursuit of truth with me? I
needed, at all events, no better proof either of the sweet or of the
bitter in her comprehension than the accent with which she replied: "Oh,
those who live in glass houses----"

"Shouldn't--no, I know they shouldn't--throw stones; and that's
precisely why I don't." I had taken her immediately up, and I held her
by it and by something better still. "You, from your fortress of
granite, can chuck them about as you will! All the more