“But you can’t. You won’t be able to tell them from the good ones, except, as I said before, that they are nicer; and by the time you find out they are wicked you will like them too much to go back.”
It was too bad of Mr. Rayner to tease me like this; but, though I saw he was enjoying my indignation, I could not help getting indignant.
“You are quite mistaken in me indeed,” I said, trying to keep down my annoyance. “I can prove it to you by something that happened to me not very long ago. I knew a person against whom I had heard nothing who always seemed to me to look good-natured and simple. And then I found out that he was really a most wicked man; and when I saw him after that his very face seemed changed to me, to look evil and cunning; and the sight of him made me shrink.”
I was thinking of Tom Parkes and the change I had seemed to see in him that morning. Mr. Rayner looked at me keenly while I said this; but I was not afraid of his finding out whom I meant in such a cautious statement.
“And what would you do if, in the course of your career as a governess, you found yourself in a family of whose morals you could not approve? Would you give them lectures on the error of their ways and try to convert them all round, Miss Christie?”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t do that!” said I humbly. “If I found myself among very dreadful people, I should just run away back to my uncle’s house, where my mother lives, on the first opportunity, without saying anything to any one till I was gone, and without even writing to say I was coming, lest my letter should be intercepted. I should be so horribly afraid of them.”
“Well, child, I hope you will never have to do anything so desperate as that; but the profession of teaching has its dangers for a beautiful woman,” he said gravely.
The last words gave a shock to me. I had never heard them applied to me before, and for a moment I was without an answer. He had been sitting on my seat, and I had been standing with my back against a young oak-tree, a few feet from him and nearer to the pond. He got up and came towards me, when a shrill little cry as from out of the ground caused him to start. It was the only sound that ever drew forth such a display of ordinary human weakness from self-possessed Mr. Rayner. It came from the lips of his baby-daughter Mona, who, ragged, dirty, and withered-looking as usual, had walked or crawled through the mud and rushes till she had silently taken her place in the long grass a little way from us, and who now, seeing her father approach, had given vent to her extraordinary dislike of him in her usual undutiful manner.
For one moment I saw in the dusk a look pass over Mr. Rayner’s face which made me catch my breath; it reminded me instantly of his tone on that Sunday night when he had caught Sarah in the garden; and, quickly as it passed and gave place to a light laugh, it had frightened me and made me long to escape. Mona was an excuse.
“Oh, you naughty little girl to be out so late at night—and without a hat! Sarah must have forgotten you. Come—I must take you in now. Be a good girl, and come with me.”