"I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII