her in the house.

"But what else could we do?" she exclaimed.

That little cry of distress quite genuine in its inexpressiveness,
altered my feeling towards Mrs Fyne. It would have been so easy to
have done nothing and to have thought no more about it. My liking for
her began while she was trying to tell me of the night she spent by the
girl's bedside, the night before her departure with her unprepossessing
relative. That Mrs Fyne found means to comfort the child I doubt very
much. She had not the genius for the task of undoing that which the
hate of an infuriated woman had planned so well.

You will tell me perhaps that children's impressions are not durable.
That's true enough. But here, child is only a manner of speaking. The
girl was within a few days of her sixteenth birthday; she was old enough
to be matured by the shock. The very effort she had to make in
conveying the impression to Mrs Fyne, in remembering the details, in
finding adequate words--or any words at all--was in itself a terribly
enlightening, an ageing process. She had talked a long time,
uninterrupted by Mrs Fyne, childlike enough in her wonder and pain,
pausing now and then to interject the pitiful query: "It was cruel of
her. Wasn't it cruel, Mrs Fyne?"

For Charley she found excuses. He at any rate had not said anything,
while he had looked very gloomy and miserable. He couldn't have taken
part against his aunt--could he? But after all he did, when she called
upon him, take "that cruel woman away." He had dragged her out by the
arm. She had seen that plainly. She remembered it. That was it! The
woman was mad. "Oh! Mrs Fyne, don't tell me she wasn't mad. If you
had only seen her face..."

But Mrs Fyne was unflinching in her idea that as much truth as could be
told was due in the way of kindness to the girl, whose fate she feared
would be to live exposed to the hardest realities of unprivileged
existences. She explained to her that there were in the world
evil-minded, selfish people. Unscrupulous people... These two persons
had been after her father's money. The best thing she could do was to
forget all about them.

"After papa's money? I don't understand," poor Flora de Barral had
murmured, and lay still as if trying to think it out in the silence and
shadows of the room where only a night-light was burning. Then she had
a long shivering fit while holding tight the hand of Mrs Fyne whose
patient immobility by the