"Yes," she said, nodding her head. "You have always been very kind to me, Canon Ronder, as you have been to many others in this place. Thank you." She looked at him almost as severely as he had looked at her. "I will be as brief as possible. I will not hide from you that I have never forgiven Archdeacon Brandon for his cruel treatment of me. That, I think, is natural. When your livelihood is taken away from you for no reason at all, you are not likely to forget it--if you are human. And I do not pretend to be more nor less than human. I will not deny that I saw these visits of Mrs. Brandon's with considerable curiosity. There was something hurried and secret in Mrs. Brandon's manner that seemed to me odd. I became then, quite by chance, the friend of Mr. Morris's cook-housekeeper, Mrs. Baker, a very nice woman. That, I think, was quite natural as we were neighbours, so to speak, and Mrs. Baker was herself a friend of Mrs. Bassett's. "I asked no indiscreet questions, but at last Mrs. Baker confessed to both Mrs. Bassett and myself that she did not like what was going on in Mr. Morris's house, and that she thought of giving notice. When we asked her what she meant she said that Mrs. Brandon was the trouble, that she was always coming to the house, and that she and the reverend gentleman were shut up for hours together by themselves. She told us, too, that Mr. Morris's sister-in-law, Miss Burnett, had also made objections. We advised Mrs. Baker that it was her duty to stay, at any rate for the present." Miss Milton paused. Ronder said nothing. "Well, sir, things got so bad that Miss Burnett went away to the sea. During her absence Mrs. Brandon came to the house quite regularly, and Mrs. Baker told us that they scarcely seemed to mind who saw them." As Ronder looked at her he realised how little he knew about women. He hated to realise this, as he hated to realise any ignorance or weakness in himself, but in the face of the woman opposite to him there was a mixture of motives--of greed, revenge, yes, and strangely enough, of a virgin's outraged propriety--that was utterly alien to his experience. He felt his essential, his almost inhuman, celibacy more at that moment, perhaps, than he had ever felt it before.