Her spirits sank. “I made no secret of my age, sir. I am perhaps older than you imagine. I am six and twenty.”
“You look younger,” he commented.
“I hope it need not signify, sir. I assure you, I am not without experience.”
“You can hardly have had experience of what now lies before you,” he retorted.
A dreadful suspicion crossed Miss Rochdale’s mind. “Good heavens, he is not—he surely cannot be— deranged, sir?” she exclaimed.
“No, he is quite sane,” he answered. “It is brandy, not madness, to which the greater part of his propensity for evil is attributable.”
“ Brandy?”she gasped.
He raised his brows. “Yes, I thought you had not been told the whole,” he said. “I am sorry. I intended—and indeed ordered—otherwise.”
Miss Rochdale now realized that not her charge but her employer was mentally deranged. She rose to her feet, saying with a firmness which she hoped concealed her inward alarm, “I think, sir, it would be best that I should present myself without further loss of time to Mrs. Macclesfield.”
“To whom?” he asked, rather blankly.