Page:The Sacred Fount (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901).djvu/309

 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?" 303