“He wouldn’t be bothered with more?” This squared well enough with my impression of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very particular perhaps about some of the company he kept. All the same, I pressed my interlocutress. “I promise you I would have told!”
She felt my discrimination. “I dare say I was wrong. But, really, I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Of things that man could do. Quint was so clever—he was so deep.”
I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. “You weren’t afraid of anything else? Not of his effect——?”
“His effect?” she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while I faltered.
“On innocent little precious lives. They were in your charge.”
“No, they were not in mine!” she roundly and distressfully returned. “The master believed in him and placed him here because he was supposed not to be well and the country air so good for him. So he had everything to say. Yes”—she let me have it—“even about them.”
“Them—that creature?” I had to smother a kind of howl. “And you could bear it!”
“No. I couldn’t—and I can’t now!” And the poor woman burst into tears.