I took time myself now to relight. Ridiculous as it may sound, I had my nerves to steady; which is a proof, surely, that for real excitement there are no such adventures as intellectual ones. "Oh, to-morrow I shall be off in space!" "Certainly we shall neither of us be here. But can't we arrange, say, to meet in town, or even to go up together in such conditions as will enable us to talk?" I patted his arm again. "Thank you for your patience. It's really good of you. Who knows if I shall be alive to-morrow? We _are_ meeting. We _do_ talk." But with all I had to think of I must have fallen, on this, into the deepest of silences, for the next thing I remember is his returning: "We don't!" I repeated my gesture of reassurance, I conveyed that I should be with him again in a minute, and presently, while he gave me time, he came back to something of his own. "My wink, at all events, would have been nothing for any question between us, as I've just said, without yours. That's what I call your responsibility. It was, as we put the matter, the torch of your analogy----" "Oh, the torch of my analogy!" I had so groaned it--as if for very ecstasy--that it pulled him up, and I could see his curiosity as indeed reaffected. But he went on with a coherency that somewhat admonished me: "It was your making me, as I told you this morning, think over what you had said about Brissenden and his wife: it was _that_----" "That made you think over"--I took him straight up--"what you yourself had said about our troubled lady? Yes, precisely. That _was_ the torch of my analogy. What I showed you in the one case seemed to tell you what to look for in the other. You thought it over. I accuse you of nothing worse than of _having_ thought it over. But you see what thinking it over does for it." The way I said this appeared to amuse him. "I see what it does for _you_!" "No, you don't! Not at all yet. That's just the embarrassment." "Just whose?" If I had thanked him for his patience he showed that he deserved it. "Just yours?" "Well, say mine. But when you do----!" And I paused as for the rich promise of it. "When I do see where you are, you mean?" "The only difficulty is whether you _can_ see. But we must try. You've set me whirling round, but we must go step by step. Oh, but it's all in your germ!"--I kept that up. "If she isn't now beastly unhappy----" "She's beastly happy?" he broke in, getting firmer hold, if not of the real impression he had just been gathering under my eyes, then at least of something he had begun to make out that my argument required. "Well, that _is_ the way I see her difference. Her difference, I mean," he added, in his evident wish to work with me, "her difference from her other difference! There!" He laughed as if, also, he had found himself fairly fantastic. "Isn't _that_ clear for you?" "Crystalline--for _me_. But that's because I know why."