“Oh, no; that’s nothing—now!” Then I explained. “It’s of not seeing her.”
But my companion only looked wan. “I don’t understand you.”
“Why, it’s that the child may keep it up—and that the child assuredly will—without my knowing it.”
At the image of this possibility Mrs. Grose for a moment collapsed, yet presently to pull herself together again, as if from the positive force of the sense of what, should we yield an inch, there would really be to give way to. “Dear, dear—we must keep our heads! And after all, if she doesn’t mind it——!” She even tried a grim joke. “Perhaps she likes it!”
“Likes such things—a scrap of an infant!”
“Isn’t it just a proof of her blessed innocence?” my friend bravely inquired.
She brought me, for the instant, almost round. “Oh, we must clutch at that—we must cling to it! If it isn’t a proof of what you say, it’s a proof of—God knows what! For the woman’s a horror of horrors.”
Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; then at last raising them, “Tell me how you know,” she said.
“Then you admit it’s what she was?” I cried.
“Tell me how you know,” my friend simply repeated.