THE SACRED FOUNT
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?"
"You after all then now don't?" It was she
317
