She gazed into Katherine's face blankly for a moment, then gradually withdrew her eyes to fix them on a bit of sky visible through the bowed shutters of the open window.
When the silence became unendurable, "Won't you speak to me, grandmother?" the girl pleaded. "Won't you let me feel you understand?"
There was a long pause before any answer came.
"Understand? No, I don't understand. How could one understand one's own flesh and blood being, doing—what you describe? That story would be perpetually new—perpetually incomprehensible. But perhaps you're vaporing. Using big words for insignificant things. A child's trick. Tell me the truth, and be quick about it."
There was something so formidable in the tiny old woman sitting there, coldly withdrawn into herself again, controlling any show of natural emotion with a fairly uncanny skill, that Katherine quailed before her.
In as few words as possible, she sketched the story of the recovered pocket.
Madam Crewe heard her through, in silence. In silence, received the object that had, at one time, been such a determining factor in her life. Katherine could not see that she betrayed, by so much as the quiver of an eyelash, the natural interest one might be conceived as feeling in so significant a link with the past.
"Be good enough to leave me," the old woman said at last. "And don't open this subject again, unless I bid you. If I need any one I'll ring for Eunice. Don't you come—for the present. Oh, before you go, see that you keep a close mouth about this thing, not alone to me, but to every one. Understand?"
Katherine nodded dumbly. She felt like a child dismissed in disgrace, or a prisoner returned to his cell. She did not know how long she remained in her room, but when Eunice came to announce luncheon, she sent her away, merely explaining that she was not hungry. And would Eunice kindly answer if Madam Crewe should ring?
Within her, a hundred impulses of revolt urged to some act of self-deliverance. She fought them down with appeals to her own better nature, her grandmother's need of her. It was to escape from herself, as much as from her environment, that, at last, in desperation, she caught up her hat and left the house.