Following this with the final ease to which my encouragement directly ministered, he yet gave me, before he had quite arrived, a queer sidelong glance. "Wouldn't it really be better if you were to tell me? I don't ask her myself, you see. I don't put things to her in that way." "Oh, no--I've shown you how I do see. That's a part of your admirable consideration. But I must repeat that nothing would induce me to tell you." His poor old face fairly pleaded. "But I want so to know." "Ah, there it is!" I almost triumphantly laughed. "There what is?" "Why, everything. What I've divined, between you and Mrs. Server, as the tie. Your wanting so to know." I felt as if he were now, intellectually speaking, plastic wax in my hand. "And her wanting me not to?" "Wanting _me_ not to," I smiled. He puzzled it out. "And being willing, therefore----" "That you--you only, for sympathy, for fellowship, for the wild wonder of it--_should_ know? Well, for all those things, and in spite of what you call your fear, _try_ her!" With which now at last I quitted him. VIII I'm afraid I can't quite say what, after that, I at first did, nor just how I immediately profited by our separation. I felt absurdly excited, though this indeed was what I had felt all day; there had been in fact deepening degrees of it ever since my first mystic throb after finding myself, the day before in our railway-carriage, shut up to an hour's contemplation and collation, as it were, of Gilbert Long and Mrs. Brissenden. I have noted how my first full contact with the changed state of these associates had caused the knell of the tranquil mind audibly to ring for me. I have spoken of my sharpened perception that something altogether out of the common had happened, independently, to each, and I could now certainly flatter myself that I hadn't missed a feature of the road I had thus been beguiled to travel. It was a road that had carried me far, and verily at this hour I _felt_ far. I daresay that for a while after leaving poor Briss, after what I may indeed call launching him, this was what I predominantly felt. To be where I was, to whatever else it might lead, treated me by its help to the taste of success. It appeared then that the more things I fitted together the larger sense, every way, they made--a remark in which I found an extraordinary elation. It justified my indiscreet curiosity; it crowned my underhand process with beauty. The beauty perhaps was only for _me_--the beauty of having been right; it made at all events an element in which, while the long day softly dropped, I wandered and drifted and securely floated. This element bore me bravely up, and my private triumph struck me as all one with the charm of the moment and of the place.