"Why, under the Heavens, _why_?" he asked. "Why put ideas in her head, if she's perfectly all right?" "I think everybody ought to know about everything," she answered sweepingly, "and they're not perfectly all right unless they do. At least, if she _has_ heard anything, she ought to know that you don't blame Flora, that you don't think there was anything but talk. You could talk it over with her, get it out into the light." "It would be poisoning her mind against her mother to mention it." "I don't believe," Cousin Hetty held to her point steadily, pale, very much in earnest, "I don't believe that the truth can poison anybody's mind." "Well, I believe in using ordinary horse-sense about everything," he said conclusively, with a peremptory accent. Cousin Hetty fell back from this brute assertion of his authority. "You'd made up your mind what to do before you ever spoke to me," she told him, not without bitterness. "That isn't fair, I didn't know enough to make up my mind. You told me what I needed to know," he answered. "I wish I _could_ tell you what you need to know," she flamed out at him. But she evidently found it useless to try any longer, and sank again huddled in her low chair. He got up carelessly and shook himself to start the blood through his great frame, numbed by immobility. His eye was caught by the expression of the old woman's face as she looked up at him. He stood still, considering her, "You're going to miss Marise," he said. She turned back hastily towards the fire, to hide the sudden trembling of her lips, and presently said in a dry voice, "All I want is for her to have what is best for her." He agreed to this with relief, "Sure! So do I. Poor kid. _She_ never asked to be born." Later, as he started up the stairs, his glass kerosene lamp in his hand, he said, "You know, Hetty, as well as I do that it doesn't make any difference what we do, or don't do for her. She's got to take what's coming to her just like everybody else." His cousin looked down at the steady, commonplace little flame of her own lamp, "I don't suppose I'll ever see her again," she said in a low tone of profound sadness. But she added stoically, as she began to climb the stairs after him, "Not that that makes any difference to anybody but me." CHAPTER XXXVII Paris, May, 1905. "Hola ... p-s-st! Allen!" called Marthe Tollet, as Marise passed through the glass-covered verandah, on her way to the street door. In her haste to stop Marise, she used the abrupt surname hail which the girls thought so very chic and truly English, which the older teachers forbade as rude and barbarous, a typical manifestation of the crumbling down of civilized French ways under the onslaught of modern Anglo-Saxon roughness.