"Of course the Brissendens are immense! If they hadn't been immense they wouldn't have been--_nothing_ would have been--anything." Then after a pause, "Your image is splendid," I went on--"your being out of the cave. But what is it exactly," I insidiously threw out, "that you _call_ the 'light of day'?" I remained a moment, however, not sure whether I had been too subtle or too simple. He had another of his cautions. "What do _you_----?" But I was determined to make him give it me all himself, for it was from my not prompting him that its value would come. "You tell me," I accordingly rather crudely pleaded, "first." It gave us a moment during which he so looked as if I asked too much, that I had a fear of losing all. He even spoke with some impatience. "If you really haven't found it for yourself, you know. I scarce see what you _can_ have found." Then I had my inspiration. I risked an approach to roughness, and all the more easily that my words were strict truth. "Oh, don't be afraid--greater things than yours!" It succeeded, for it played upon his curiosity, and he visibly imagined that, with impatience controlled, he should learn what these things were. He relaxed, he responded, and the next moment I was in all but full enjoyment of the piece wanted to make all my other pieces right--right because of that special beauty in my scheme through which the whole depended so on each part and each part so guaranteed the whole. "What I call the light of day is the sense I've arrived at of her vision." "Her vision?"--I just balanced in the air. "Of what they have in common. _His_--poor chap's--extraordinary situation too." "Bravo! And you see in that----?" "What, all these hours, has touched, fascinated, drawn her. It has been an instinct with her." "Bravissimo!" It saw him, my approval, safely into port. "The instinct of sympathy, pity--the response to fellowship in misery; the sight of another fate as strange, as monstrous as her own." I couldn't help jumping straight up--I stood before him. "So that whoever may have _been_ the man, the man _now_, the actual man----"