"So I did. He says there is nothing the matter with me." "Nothing the matter with you, indeed! _He_ knows well enough what's the matter with you." The victim was staring now, with terror in her tired eyes. Her mouth dropped open with the question her tongue refused to utter. "If you," continued Mrs. Moon, "had wanted to tell him plainly that you were in love with him, you couldn't have set about it better. I should have thought you'd have been ashamed to look him in the face--at your age. You're a disgrace to my family!" The poor fingers ceased their labour of buttoning and unbuttoning; Miss Quincey sat with her shoulders naked as it were to the lash. "There!" said Mrs. Moon with an air of drawing back the whip and putting it by for the present. "If I were you I'd cover myself up, and not sit there catching cold with my dress-body off." CHAPTER X Miss Quincey Stands Back As it happened on a Saturday morning she had plenty of time to think about it. All the afternoon and the evening and the night lay before her; she was powerless to cope with Sunday and the night beyond that. The remarkable revelation made to her by Mrs. Moon was so great a shock that her mind refused to realize it all at once. It was an outrage to all the meek reticences and chastities of her spirit. But she owned its truth; she saw it now, the thing they all had seen, that she only could not see. She had sinned the sin of sins, the sin of youth in middle-age. Now it was not imagination in Miss Quincey, so much as the tradition of St. Sidwell's, that gave her innocent affection the proportions of a crime. Miss Quincey had lived all her life in ignorance of her own nature, having spent the best part of five-and-forty years in acquiring other knowledge. She had nothing to go upon, for she had never been young; or rather she had treated her youth unkindly, she had fed it on saw-dust and given it nothing but arithmetic books to play with, so that its experiences were of no earthly use to her. And now, if they had only let her alone, she might have been none the wiser; her folly might have put on many quaint disguises, friendship, literary sympathy, intellectual esteem--there were a thousand delicate subterfuges and innocent hypocrisies, and under any one of them it might have crept about unchallenged in the shadows and blind alleys of thought. As love pure and simple, if it came to that, there was no harm in it. Many an old maid, older than she, has just such a secret folded up and put away all sweet and pure; the poor lady does not call it love, but remembrance, which is so to speak love laid in lavender; and she--who knows? She might have contrived a little shrine for it somewhere; she had always understood that love was a holy thing.