“Then you think that, when she ran away with him, she hated him and loved him both together?”
Mrs. Pennistan paused for a long time.
“Well,” she said at last, “if you ask me what I think, it’s this. There was a deal more in that running away than any of us knew at the time. What it exactly was I don’t know even now. I doubt Ruth doesn’t know either, or if she does know, she doesn’t own to it, not to herself even. I doubt Rawdon knows most about it.”
I saw another man becoming inevitable.
“And Mr. Malory?”
She shot at me a quick suspicious look.
“You’re Mr. Malory’s friend, what do you know?”
“I know nothing,” I said. “He didn’t know himself.”
“No,” said Mrs. Pennistan suddenly, “that’s the truth. He didn’t know himself. He wasn’t a man to fancy those things. To me it was as plain as daylight, but Pennistan he always scoffed at me, and I daren’t speak it to Ruth, and I’ve thought since that maybe I was wrong after all. Maybe she went with Rawdon because she loved Rawdon: maybe she didn’t go, as I’ve sometimes thought, because she was afraid.... It’s hard, isn’t it, to see into people’s hearts, even when you live in the same house with them? Day in, day out, and you know little more of them than the clothes they wear and what they like to get to eat.”
I was sorry for her. She went on,—