ure in Chirk Street gave him a sense of how little as yet that
character was clear to him. What was it, to speak plainly, that Mr.
Croy had originally done?

"I don't know--and I don't want to. I only know that years and years
ago--when I was about fifteen--something or other happened that made
him impossible. I mean impossible for the world at large first, and
then, little by little, for mother. We of course didn't know it at the
time," Kate explained, "but we knew it later; and it was, oddly enough,
my sister who first made out that he had done something. I can hear her
now--the way, one cold, black Sunday morning when, on account of an
extraordinary fog, we had not gone to church, she broke it to me by the
school-room fire. I was reading a history-book by the lamp--when we
didn't go to church we had to read history-books--and I suddenly heard
her say, out of the fog, which was in the room, and _apropos_ of
nothing: 'Papa has done something wicked.' And the curious thing was
that I believed it on the spot and have believed it ever since, though
she could tell me nothing more--neither what was the wickedness, nor
how she knew, nor what would happen to him, nor anything else about it.
We had our sense, always, that all sorts of things _had_ happened, were
all the while happening, to him; so that when Marian only said she was
sure, tremendously sure, that she had made it out for herself, but that
that was enough, I took her word for it--it seemed somehow so natural.
We were not, however, to ask mother--which made it more natural still,
and I said never a word. But mother, strangely enough, spoke of it to
me, in time, of her own accord very much later on. He hadn't been with
us for ever so long, but we were used to that. She must have had some
fear, some conviction that I had an idea, some idea of her own that it
was the best thing to do. She came out as abruptly as Marian had done:
'If you hear anything against your father--anything I mean, except that
he's odious and vile--remember it's perfectly false.' That was the way
I knew--it was true, though I recall that I said to her then that I of
course knew it wasn't. She might have told me it was true, and yet have
trusted me to contradict fiercely enough any accusation of him that I
should meet--to contradict it much more fiercely and effectively, I
think, than she would have done herself. As it happens, however," the
girl went on, "I've never had occasion, and I've been co