Gerard stood up, reaching for his raincoat.
"Beware of heroine-worship, it is the folly. When you find the real woman, get on your knees, where you belong, before a grace of God, but don't build shrines to an imitation."
Astonished, Corrie paused, upright beside the ciderpress, then smiled with a blending of pride and serious exaltation.
"No danger of that! I—that can never happen to me," he assured quietly. "I am safe-guarded from imitations, win or lose. I believe, if I am given to hero-worship, that I'm pretty good at picking the right subjects for it. Had enough cider?"
"Too much, probably. If I am ill to-morrow, I shall tell Rupert that you poisoned me. Are you going around to pay the lord proprietors of the place for what we have consumed?"
"Who, me? If I did, Mrs. Goodwin might box my ears for the impertinence; she has boxed them before. I grew up around here, remember. The first acquaintance I made with this house was when I shied an apple at the family tabby as it sat sunning itself on the well-curb, and bowled it in. Naturally, I hadn't meant to hit it; the beast stepped forward just as I fired. I nearly fell in, myself, trying to get it out, but the well was deep and I couldn't raise a meow or a whisker. It was a fine November Sunday, I remember, and while I was busy the family drove into the yard, home from church. I bolted. No one saw me go, but by and by I began to remember all the yarns I ever had heard about people getting typhoid fever from polluted well-water, and to imagine that entire household dying on my hands. Remorse with a capital R! I felt like Cesare Borgia and Madame de Brinvilliers and the Veiled Mokanna all rolled into one. When I couldn't stand it any longer, I sneaked into Flavia's room at two o'clock in the morning, for counsel."
"She gave it?"
"She gave it. You can always count on Flavia. I can see her now, sitting up in bed with her hair braided in two big yellow plaits and her troubled kiddie countenance turned to me.
"'You will have to tell either papa or those people,' she decided, wise as a toy owl. 'And if you tell them, they will surely tell papa, so perhaps you would rather tell him yourself. But I am sorry, dear darling.'
"So I 'fessed up, after breakfast."