“Oho! you’re a simple one, you are,” she said, pointing her finger at her. “You’re downright innocent, if ever a girl was, with your hands folded and your hair hanging about your face, like a half-blown angel, more fit for a marble monument than for this wicked world. You couldn’t give anybody a kiss on the quiet, could you? Your lips would blush themselves off first, wouldn’t they? And as for marrying him if his ma didn’t like it, that you’d never, never do. I’ll tell you what it is, Joan: I’m getting a better opinion of you every day; you ain’t half the fool I thought you, after all. You remember what I said to you about Samuel, and you think that I’ve got his money in my pocket and other people’s too perhaps, and that I’m just setting a trap for you and going to give you away. Well, as a matter of fact I wasn’t this time, so you might just as well have been open with me. But there you are, girl: go about your own business in your own fashion. I see that you can be trusted to look after yourself, and I won’t spoil sport. I’ve been blind and deaf and dumb before now—yes, blinder than you think, perhaps, for all your psalm-singing air—and I can be again. And now I’m off; only I tell you fair I won’t work for nothing, so don’t you begin to whine about poor relations when once you’re married, else I may find a way to make it hot for you yet, seeing that there’s things you mightn’t like spoken of when you’re ‘my lady’ and respectable.” And with this jocular threat on her lips Mrs. Gillingwater vanished. When her aunt had gone, Joan drew the sheet over her face as though she sought to hide herself, and wept in the bitterness of her shame. She was what she was; but did she deserve to be spoken to like this? She would rather a hundred times have borne her aunt’s worst violence than be made the object of her loathly compliments. How much did this woman know? Surely everything, or she would not dare to address her as she had done. She had no longer any respect for her, and that must be the reason of her odious assumption that there was nothing to choose between them, that they were equal in evil. She would not believe her when she said that she had no wish to marry Henry—she thought that the speech was dictated by a low cunning like her own. Well, perhaps it was fortunate that she did not believe her; for, if she had, what would have happened?