"They are cruel to the Kid, both Bough and the woman?"
She began to shake. The guardian Sister, who sat sewing a little way behind her, looked up anxiously at her charge. He pacified her with a glance, and, taking one of the slender trembling hands in a firm, kind clasp, repeated his question:
"Always cruel, cruel! But Bough——"
A spasm contracted her face. At the base of the slender throat something throbbed and throbbed. She whispered brokenly:
"When the woman went away——"
Her slender fingers closed desperately upon his. Her heart shook her, and Fear was in her eyes. Her voice vibrated and shuddered at her white lips as a caught moth vibrates and shudders in a spider-web. She began again:
"When the woman went away, Bough——"
Her eyes quailed and flickered; her pale and quivering face was convulsed by a sudden spasm of awful fear. The muscles of her whole body stiffened in the immovable rigor of terror. Only her head jerked from side to side, like that of some timid creature of the wilds held captive in crushing folds or crunching fangs. And he comprehended all; and understood all, in one lightning leap of intuition, as he saw.
"Hush!" He stopped her with his authoritative eyes and the firm, reassuring pressure of his hand. "Forget that—speak of it no more. Try and tell me who lies here, under these grasses and flowers that you water every day?"
He moved the hand he held to touch the grave, and the spasm that contracted her features relaxed, and the terror died out of her eyes, as though some soothing, healing virtue were conveyed to her by the mere contact with that sacred earth. He went on: