“I found it out.”
“You knew?”
“I went to Vere’s room. The poems were on the table with your corrections. I read them.”
“We ought to have told you.”
“I oughtn’t to have read them, but I did.”
“A mother has the right—”
“Not a mother who has resigned her right to question her child. I had said to Vere, ‘Keep your secrets.’ So I had no right, and I did wrong in reading them.”
He felt that she was instinctively trying to match his sincerity with hers, and that fact helped him to continue.
“The knowledge of this budding talent of Vere’s made me take a new interest in her, made me wish very much—at least I thought, I believed it was that, Hermione—that no disturbing influence should come into her life. Isidoro Panacci came—through me. Peppina came—through you. Hermione, on the night when Vere and I went out alone together in the boat Vere learned the truth about Peppina and the life behind the shutter.”
“I knew that, too.”