It seemed so, for my thought, the gleam of something that fitted, that I was almost afraid of quenching the gleam by pressure. I must then get everything I could from him without asking too much. "You don't quite know to _what_ else?" "No--I don't quite know." But there was a sound in it, this time, that I took as the hint of a wish to know--almost a recognition that I might help him. I helped him accordingly as I could and, I may add, as far as the positive flutter he had stirred in me suffered. It fitted--it fitted! "If her change is to something other, I suppose then a change back is not quite the exact name for it." "Perhaps not." I fairly thrilled at his taking the suggestion as if it were an assistance. "She isn't at any rate what I thought her yesterday." It was amazing into what depths this dropped for me and with what possibilities it mingled. "I remember what you said of her yesterday." I drew him on so that I brought back for him the very words he had used. "She was so beastly unhappy." And he used them now visibly not as a remembrance of what he had said, but for the contrast of the fact with what he at present perceived; so that the value this gave for me to what he at present perceived was immense. "And do you mean that that's gone?" He hung fire, however, a little as to saying so much what he meant, and while he waited he again looked at me. "What do _you_ mean? Don't you think so yourself?" I laid my hand on his arm and held him a moment with a grip that betrayed, I daresay, the effort in me to keep my thoughts together and lose not a thread. It betrayed at once, doubtless, the danger of that failure and the sharp foretaste of success. I remember that with it, absolutely, I struck myself as knowing again the joy of the intellectual mastery of things unamenable, that joy of determining, almost of creating results, which I have already mentioned as an exhilaration attached to some of my plunges of insight. "It would take long to tell you what I mean." The tone of it made him fairly watch me as I had been watching him. "Well, haven't we got the whole night?" "Oh, it would take more than the whole night--even if we had it!" "By which you suggest that we haven't it?" "No--we haven't it. I want to get away." "To go to bed? I thought you were so keen." "I _am_ keen. Keen is no word for it. I don't want to go to bed. I want to get away." "To leave the house--in the middle of the night?" "Yes--absurd as it may seem. You excite me too much. You don't know what you do to me." He continued to look at me; then he gave a laugh which was not the contradiction, but quite the attestation, of the effect produced on him by my grip. If I had wanted to hold him I held him. It only came to me even that I held him too much. I felt this in fact with the next thing he said. "If you're too excited, then, to be coherent now, will you tell me to-morrow?"