back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air.