She understood Lindley; but she wasn't even trying to understand her mother. The vexed face and picking fingers meant nothing to her. She was saying to herself, "I can't tell Mamma I saw him with Nannie in the lane. I oughtn't to have seen him. He didn't know anybody was there. He didn't want me to see him. I'd be a perfect beast to tell her." Her mother went on: "I don't know what to do with you, Mary. One would have thought my only daughter would have been a comfort to me, but I declare you've given me more trouble than any of my children." "More than Dan?" "Dan hadn't a chance. He'd have been different if your poor father hadn't driven him out of the house. He'd be different now if your Uncle Victor had kept him.... It's hard for poor Dan if he can't bring his friends to the house any more because of you." "Because of me?" "Because of your folly." She understood. Her mother believed that she had frightened Lindley away. She was thinking of Aunt Charlotte. It would have been all right if she could have told her about Nannie; then Mamma would have seen why Lindley couldn't come. "I don't care," she thought. "She may think what she likes. I can't tell her." XI. Lindley Vickers had gone. Nothing was left of him but Mamma's silence and Dan's, and Nannie's flush as she slunk by and her obscene smirk of satisfaction. Then Nannie forgot him. As if nothing had happened she hung about Horn's yard and the Back Lane, waiting for young Horn. She smiled her trusting smile again. As long as you lived in Morfe you would remember. Mary didn't blame her mother and Dan for their awful attitude. She couldn't blink the fact that she had begun to care for a man who was no better than young Horn, who had shown her that he didn't care for her by going to Nannie. If he could go to Nannie he was no better than young Horn. She thought of Lindley's communion with Nannie as a part of him, essential, enduring. Beside it, her own communion with him was not quite real. She remembered his singing; she remembered playing to him and sitting beside him on the bracken as you remember things that have happened to you a long time ago (if they had really happened). She remembered phrases broken from their context (if they had ever had a context): "Das man vom liebsten was man hat...." "If you don't know I can't tell you--Dear." ... "And when--when--Then you won't think, you'll _know_." She said to herself, "I must have been mad. It couldn't have happened. I must have made it up." But, if you made up things like that you _were_ mad. It was what Aunt Charlotte had done. She had lived all her life in a dream of loving and being loved, a dream that began with clergymen and ended with the piano-tuner and the man who did the clocks. Mamma and Dan knew it. Uncle Victor knew it and he had been afraid. Maurice Jourdain knew it and he had been afraid. Perhaps Lindley Vickers knew it, too.