"It _is_ then strong"--and I could see indeed she was ready to satisfy me. "You've worried me for my motive and harassed me for my 'moment,' and I've had to protect others and, at the cost of a decent appearance, to pretend to be myself half an idiot. I've had even, for the same purpose--if you must have it--to depart from the truth; to give you, that is, a false account of the manner of my escape from your tangle. But now the truth shall be told, and others can take care of themselves!" She had so wound herself up with this, reached so the point of fairly heaving with courage and candour, that I for an instant almost miscalculated her direction and believed she was really throwing up her cards. It was as if she had decided, on some still finer lines, just to rub my nose into what I had been spelling out; which would have been an anticipation of my own journey's crown of the most disconcerting sort. I wanted my personal confidence, but I wanted nobody's confession, and without the journey's crown where _was_ the personal confidence? Without the personal confidence, moreover, where was the personal honour? That would be really the single thing to which I could attach authority, for a confession might, after all, be itself a lie. Anybody, at all events, could fit the shoe to one. My friend's intention, however, remained but briefly equivocal; my danger passed, and I recognised in its place a still richer assurance. It was not the unnamed, in short, who were to be named. "Lady John _is_ the woman." Yet even this was prodigious. "But I thought your present position was just that she's _not_!" "Lady John _is_ the woman," Mrs. Briss again announced. "But I thought your present position was just that nobody is!" "Lady John _is_ the woman," she a third time declared. It naturally left me gaping. "Then there _is_ one?" I cried between bewilderment and joy. "A woman? There's _her_!" Mrs. Briss replied with more force than grammar. "I know," she briskly, almost breezily added, "that I said she wouldn't do (as I had originally said she would do better than any one), when you a while ago mentioned her. But that was to save her." "And you don't care now," I smiled, "if she's lost!" She hesitated. "She _is_ lost. But she can take care of herself." I could but helplessly think of her. "I'm afraid indeed that, with what you've done with her, _I_ can't take care of her. But why is she now to the purpose," I articulately wondered, "any more than she was?" "Why? On the very system you yourself laid down. When we took him for brilliant, she couldn't be. But now that we see him as he is----" "We can only see her also as _she_ is?" Well, I tried, as far as my amusement would permit, so to see her; but still there were difficulties. "Possibly!" I at most conceded. "Do you owe your discovery, however, wholly to my system? My system, where so much made for protection," I explained, "wasn't intended to have the effect of exposure."