with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really together--even for three minutes, I would, I sincerely considered, have come round. But I was to have performed this revolution on nothing less, as I now went on to explain to her. "Of course if you've got new evidence I shall be delighted to hear it; and of course I can't help wondering whether the possession of it and the desire to overwhelm me with it aren't, together, the one thing you've been nursing till now." Oh, how intensely she didn't like such a tone! If she hadn't looked so handsome I would say she made a wry face over it, though I didn't even yet see where her dislike would make her come out. Before she came out, in fact, she waited as if it were a question of dashing her head at a wall. Then, at last, she charged. "It's nonsense. I've nothing to tell you. I feel there's nothing in it and I've given it up." I almost gaped--by which I mean that I looked as if I did--for surprise. "You agree that it's not she----?" Then, as she again waited, "It's _you_ who've come round?" I insisted. "To your doubt of its being May? Yes--I've come round." "Ah, pardon me," I returned; "what I expressed this morning was, if I remember rightly, not at all a 'doubt,' but a positive, intimate conviction that was inconsistent with _any_ doubt. I was emphatic--purely and simply--that I didn't see it." She looked, however, as if she caught me in a weakness here. "Then why did you say to me that if you should reconsider----" "You should handsomely have it from me, and my grounds? Why, as I've just reminded you, as a form of courtesy to you--magnanimously to help you, as it were, to feel as comfortable as I conceived you naturally would desire to feel in your own conviction. Only for that. And now," I smiled, "I'm to understand from you that, in spite of that immense allowance, you _haven't_, all this while, felt comfortable?" She gave, on this, in a wonderful, beautiful way, a slow, simplifying headshake. "Mrs. Server isn't in it!" The only way then to take it from her was that her concession was a prelude to something still better; and when I had given her time to see this dawn upon me I had my eagerness and I jumped into the breathless. "You've made out then who _is_?" "Oh, I don't make out, you know," she laughed, "so much as you! _She_ isn't," she simply repeated.