"Would she tell you things she never told any one else?"
"Yes, things she never dared tell any one else."
Ramsey pondered, laughed, and pondered and laughed again: "Why, most of that time you was—you were—nothing but a little toddler. Didn't she love you?"
"She hated me."
Ramsey flinched but quickly laughed a bright unbelief to the youth's face, a face which might as well have been a wood-carving. "Oh," she cried, "how ridiculous!"
"She used to flog me, cruelly."
Ramsey gasped: "And you never told? Oh, why—why——?"
"She said she'd kill me—and my mother. And she'd have done it, somehow."
"But she's been dead ten years!"
"Has she?"