THE SACRED FOUNT
her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one would have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive—old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it—had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly—by which I meant morally—handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then—made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to her that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts had I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together—really together—even for three minutes, I would, I sincerely considered, have come round. But I was to have performed
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