She couldn’t know my reasons for a calmness after all pretty shallow; so I showed them off as I might. “I hope then it was to more purpose than in this case! The note, at any rate, that I put on the table yesterday,” I pursued, “will have given him so scant an advantage⁠—for it contained only the bare demand for an interview⁠—that he is already much ashamed of having gone so far for so little, and that what he had on his mind last evening was precisely the need of confession.” I seemed to myself, for the instant, to have mastered it, to see it all. “Leave us, leave us”⁠—I was already, at the door, hurrying her off. “I’ll get it out of him. He’ll meet me⁠—he’ll confess. If he confesses, he’s saved. And if he’s saved⁠—”

“Then you are?” The dear woman kissed me on this, and I took her farewell. “I’ll save you without him!” she cried as she went.