Chance

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 bedside of that brutally murdered childhood did

infinite honour to her humanity. That vigil must have been the more

trying because I could see very well that at no time did she think the

victim particularly charming or sympathetic. It was a manifestation of

pure compassion, of compassion in itself, so to speak, not many women

would have been capable of displaying with that unflinching steadiness.

The shivering fit over, the girl's next words in an outburst of sobs

were, "Oh! Mrs. Fyne, am I really such a horrid thing as she has made me

out to be?"