"Have done, lassie!" he said, half angrily, half beseechingly, but she did not understand that he was suffering, and she went on, relentlessly: "And you knew that bad men used to come to see her at night—they have not come for a long time—but you never tried to stop their coming, and I could have stopped it if I had known they were bad; but I did not know at first, and I was only a little girl, and you should have told me."
"Have done!" It was all that he could say, for like many he had heard of men visiting the Painted Lady by stealth, and he had only wondered, with other gossips, who they were.
He crossed again to the side of the dead woman, "And Ballingall's was the only corpse you ever saw straiked?" he said in wonder, she had done her work so well. But he was not doubting her; he knew already that this girl was clothed in truthfulness.
"Was it you that kept this house so clean?" he asked, almost irritably, for he himself was the one undusted, neglected-looking thing in it, and he was suddenly conscious of his frayed wristband and of buttons hanging by a thread.
"Yes."
"What age are you?"
"I think I am thirteen."
He looked long at her, vindictively she thought, but he was only picturing the probable future of a painted lady's child, and he said mournfully to himself, "Ay, it does not even end here; and that's the crowning pity of it." But Grizel only heard him say, "Poor thing!" and she bridled immediately.
"I won't let you pity me," she cried.
"You dour brat!" he retorted. "But you need not think you are to have everything your own way still. I must get some Monypenny woman to take you till the funeral is over, and after that—"