Page:The Sacred Fount (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901).djvu/235

 then knew that beastly unhappiness wasn't quite all of it. It was part of it, it was enough of it; for she was—well, no doubt you could tell me. Just now, at all events"—and recalling, reflecting, deciding, he used, with the strongest effect, as he so often did in painting, the simplest term—"just now she's all right."

"All right?"

He couldn't know how much more than was possible my question gave him to answer. But he answered it on what he had; he repeated: "All right."

I wondered, in spite of the comfort I took, as I had more than once in life had occasion to take it before, at the sight of the painter-sense deeply applied. My wonder came from the fact that Lady John had also found Mrs. Server all right, and Lady John had a vision as closed as Obert's was open. It didn't suit my book for both these observers to have been affected in the same way. "You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?"

"Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she should be—well, after all, all right."

"All there, eh?" I after an instant risked.

I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or 229