The girl shuddered slightly.
“That was the only name I ever overheard. I would get as far away from them as I could, to the other end of the room, but when that beast started shouting I could not help hearing. I wish I had never heard anything. If I had got up and gone out of the room I don't suppose the woman would have killed me for it; but she would have rowed me in a nasty way. She would have threatened me and called me names. That sort, when they know you are helpless, there's nothing to stop them. I don't know how it is, but bad people, real bad people that you can see are bad, they get over me somehow. It's the way they set about downing one. I am afraid of wickedness.”
Heyst watched the changing expressions of her face. He encouraged her, profoundly sympathetic, a little amused.
“I quite understand. You needn't apologize for your great delicacy in the perception of inhuman evil. I am a little like you.”
“I am not very plucky,” she said.
“Well! I don't know myself what I would do, what countenance I would have before a creature which would strike me as being evil incarnate. Don't you be ashamed!”
She sighed, looked up with her pale, candid gaze and a timid expression on her face, and murmured:
“You don't seem to want to know what he was saying.”
“About poor Morrison? It couldn't have been anything bad, for the poor fellow was innocence itself. And then, you know, he is dead, and nothing can possibly matter to him now.”
“But I tell you that it was of you he was talking!” she cried.