'Where? She never told me,' Miss Henschil began.
'A few months before you were born--on her trip to Australia--at Mola or Molo something or other. It took me three evenings to get it all out.'
'Ay--mother's suspicious of questions,' said Miss Henschil to Conroy. 'She'll lock the door of every room she's in, if it's but for five minutes. She was a Tackberry from Jarrow way, yo' see.'
'She described your men to the life--men with faces all eaten away, staring at her over the fence of a lepers' hospital in this Molo Island. They begged from her, and she ran, she told me, all down the street, back to the pier. One touched her and she nearly fainted. She's ashamed of that still.'
'My men? The sand and the fences?' Miss Henschil muttered.
'Yes. You know how tidy she is and how she hates wind. She remembered that the fences were broken--she remembered the wind blowing. Sand--sun--salt wind--fences--faces--I got it all out of her, bit by bit. You don't know what I know! And it all happened three or four months before you were born. There!' Nurse Blaber slapped her knee with her little hand triumphantly.
'Would that account for it?' Miss Henschil shook from head to foot.
'Absolutely. I don't care who you ask! You never imagined the thing. It was laid on you. It happened on earth to you! Quick, Mr. Conroy, she's too heavy for me! I'll get the flask.'
Miss Henschil leaned forward and collapsed, as Conroy told her afterwards, like a factory chimney. She came out of her swoon with teeth that chattered on the cup.
'No--no,' she said, gulping. 'It's not hysterics. Yo' see I've no call to hev 'em any more. No call--no reason whatever. God be praised! Can't yo' feel I'm a right woman now?'