"What the woman we so earnestly looked for would have to be." "All gone?" She had hesitated, but she went on with decision. "No, she isn't all gone, since there was enough of her left to make up to poor Briss." "Precisely--and it's just what we saw, and just what, with her other dashes of the same sort, led us to have to face the question of her being--well, what I say. Or rather," I added, "what _you_ say. That is," I amended, to keep perfectly straight, "what you say you _don't_ say." I took indeed too many precautions for my friend not to have to look at them. "Extravagant?" The irritation of the word had grown for her, yet I risked repeating it, and with the effect of its giving her another pause. "I tell you she _isn't_, that!" "Exactly; and it's only to ask you what in the world then she _is_." "She's horrid!" said Mrs. Briss. "'Horrid'?" I gloomily echoed. "Horrid. It wasn't," she then developed with decision, "a 'dash,' as you say, 'of the same sort'--though goodness knows of what sort you mean; it wasn't, to be plain, a 'dash' at all." My companion _was_ plain. "She settled. She stuck." And finally, as I could but echo her again: "She made love to him." "But--a--really?" "Really. That's how I knew." I was at sea. "'Knew'? But you saw." "I knew--that is I learnt--more than I saw. I knew she couldn't be gone." It in fact brought light. "Knew it by _him_?" "He told me," said Mrs. Briss. It brought light, but it brought also, I fear, for me, another queer grimace. "Does he then regularly tell?" "Regularly. But what he tells," she did herself the justice to declare, "is not always so much to the point as the two things I've repeated to you." Their weight then suggested that I should have them over again. "His revelation, in the first place, of Long and Lady John?" "And his revelation in the second"--she spoke of it as a broad joke--"of May Server and himself." There was something in her joke that was a chill to my mind; but I nevertheless played up. "And what does he say that's further interesting about _that_?" "Why, that she's awfully sharp." I gasped--she turned it out so. "_She_--Mrs. Server?" It made her, however, equally stare. "Why, isn't it the very thing you maintained?" I felt her dreadful logic, but I couldn't--with my exquisite image all contrasted, as in a flash from flint, with this monstrosity--so much as entertain her question. I could only stupidly again sound it. "Awfully sharp?"