‘No, she is not going to do it, mother. She laughed at the idea. She said, “Lady Macbeth--or something,” just as you did. She is a very strange woman, but I don’t think that you would like her.’ ‘Probably not,’ said Lady William. ‘It is, perhaps, unkind to say it, but I am not very fond of the decayed gentlewoman in general. It would serve me right,’ she said, with half a smile and half a sigh, ‘to end like that myself.’ ‘But how could that be?’ said Mab. It was one of those questions to which there is no answer possible. Nor did she expect an answer. But it brought a little cloud over Lady William’s brow. Indeed, it was all Lady William could do to keep her face tolerably unclouded, and her conversation as cheerful as usual for Mab’s sake. And this struggle on her mother’s part kept Mab’s unusually serious face from being noticed as it otherwise must have been. After that there were no further questions asked about Mrs. Brown, and Mab went out to her gardening and the many other occupations which filled up her time. But whatever she was doing this heavy question hung upon her mind, and she carried with her the burden that was like Christian’s, yet which she had not, like him, any right to bear. Her duty to the parish was to denounce the woman who ought not, with her mysterious guiltiness, to have the training of the girls of Watcham. And her duty to her penitent was to keep everything jealously within her own breast which had been confided to her, so to speak, under the seal of confession. Mab had, as was natural, a tremendous sense of her responsibility to both, but how she was to reconcile the two was more than she could think of. She determined at last upon a compromise, which was not indeed half sufficient to meet the case, but which was the only thing she could think of. She herself, she concluded, would for the future go constantly to the school, and thus neutralise any evil that might be produced by Mrs. Brown. She would go and watch over the girls, and see that their morals were all right, and that nothing was said or done to lead them astray. By dint of thinking it over the whole afternoon, shutting herself up alone to wrestle with it, refraining even from tea in order that her deliberations might be unbroken--this was the middle course to which Mab attained. She could not betray Mrs. Brown. That was out of the question: and it was also dreadful to think of betraying the parish, which, alas! if it knew what Mab knew, would not continue Mrs. Brown in her place for a single day; but if Mab took it upon herself--her little innocent self--to watch over the girls, to be there early and late, guarding them from every allusion, from every lesson that could hurt them--would not that make up for the silence? She would watch the children as nobody else could watch. She would have eyes like the lynx and ears like those who heard the grass growing. This was what Mab determined upon in the anxiety of her soul.