"What do you think about the man yourself?" Constance persisted.
"The apprentice who practiced on me?"
She waited, watching his eyes. "I was hardly in a condition, Miss Sherrill, to appreciate anything about the man at all. Why do you ask?"
"Because—" She hesitated an instant, "if you were attacked to be killed, it meant that you must have been attacked as the son of—Mr. Corvet. Then that meant—at least it implied, that Mr. Corvet was killed, that he did not go away. You see that, of course."
"Were you the only one who thought that? Or did some one speak to you about it?"
"No one did; I spoke to father. He thought—"
"Yes."
"Well, if Mr. Corvet was murdered—I'm following what father thought, you understand—it involved something a good deal worse perhaps than anything that could have been involved if he had only gone away. The facts we had made it certain that—if what had happened to him was death at the hands of another—he must have foreseen that death and, seeking no protection for himself ... it implied, that he preferred to die rather than to ask protection—that there was something whose concealment he thought mattered even more to him than life. It—it might have meant that he considered his life was ... due to whomever took it." Her voice, which had become very low, now ceased. She was speaking to Alan of his father—a father whom he had never known, and whom he could not have recognized by sight until she showed him the picture a few weeks before; but she was speaking of his father.
"Mr. Sherrill didn't feel that it was necessary for him to do anything, even though he thought that?"
"If Mr. Corvet was dead, we could do him no good, surely, by telling this to the police; if the police succeeded in finding out all the facts, we would be doing only what Uncle Benny did not wish—what he preferred death to. We could not tell the police about it without telling them all about Mr. Corvet too. So father would not let himself believe that you had been attacked to be killed. He had to believe the police theory was sufficient."