She made him no answer.
"I wish you would tell me, if you can. The state of a married woman is honest at any rate, let her husband be who he may."
"My state is not honest."
"You are not married, then?"
"No, sir."
He hardly knew how to go on with this interrogation, or to ask questions about her past and present life, without expressing a degree of censure which, at any rate for the present, he wished to repress.
"You are living here, I believe, with old Mrs. Burrows?" he said.
"Yes, sir."
"I was told that you were married to her son."
"They told you untrue, sir. I know nothing of her son, except just to have see'd him."