‘Perhaps,’ said Leo, with a laugh, ‘it might be Mrs. Brown, the schoolmistress, whom I was pursuing all the time. She might be paying an innocent visit to some friend in the servants’ hall. In which case she will think me a dangerous madman, and I owe her an apology.’ ‘Oh, she’s not one of that sort!’ cried Jim. He said it under his breath, and fortunately nobody heard him but Florence, who gave him a look of inquiry, but no more. ‘So I might have saved myself the trouble--and the wetting,’ Leo said. XLV As it happened, however, there were several people much occupied about Mrs. Brown on the morning after that wonderful chase with all its consequences. Mab, under one pretext or another, had spent most of the previous day in the school. She had heard the bigger girls say their lessons; she had hovered about the classes taught by the schoolmistress; she had watched over the course of instruction in general with anxious eyes. Was there any tampering with the morals of the girls of Watcham? Were the little ones taught their hymns and collects? Were the big ones kept up to their catechism now that the time for their confirmation began to approach? Mab had never hitherto felt herself one of the clergy of the parish, as the Rector’s niece might have been permitted to do. But now she was torn with those sensations which we may suppose to be felt by a priest who has received under the seal of confession a new light upon the proceedings and motives of an important official. This is a drawback of the priestly office which has rarely struck the general observer. To know that a man who is largely influential in life, who has important issues on hand, is using his powers for evil and not for good, and yet to be powerless to do anything, to prevent anything, to give any warning on the subject! Many a good priest no doubt has been bowed down under this unthought-of weight. And so was Mab, whose young shoulders were quite unfit for the part. Should she tell it all to Lady William, this knowledge that was too much for her to bear? Should she give her uncle a hint that she had discovered something which made the schoolmistress unfit for her place? Mab felt that in all likelihood Uncle James would laugh at her discovery, and to repeat Mrs. Brown’s confidences, even to Lady William, would be a breach of trust. Thus the only thing Mab could do was to come in, in her own person, to hold Mrs. Brown (perhaps) in awe, to watch over the instruction, to correct what was wrong, to see how far it might be her bounden duty to interfere. One wonders how a priest would act in a similar case, or whether the possession of many secret responsibilities in his consciousness may perhaps neutralise the weight of each. Nothing neutralised this dreadful weight in Mab’s case. She watched Mrs. Brown as a cat watches a mouse. She did not like to let that enigmatical person out of her sight. She even followed down the ranks of the girls whose heads were bent over