Standing there before me while I kept my seat, she visibly turned things over. “Their uncle must do the preventing. He must take them away.” “And who’s to make him?” She had been scanning the distance, but she now dropped on me a foolish face. “You, miss.” “By writing to him that his house is poisoned and his little nephew and niece mad?” “But if they _are_, miss?” “And if I am myself, you mean? That’s charming news to be sent him by a governess whose prime undertaking was to give him no worry.” Mrs. Grose considered, following the children again. “Yes, he do hate worry. That was the great reason—” “Why those fiends took him in so long? No doubt, though his indifference must have been awful. As I’m not a fiend, at any rate, I shouldn’t take him in.” My companion, after an instant and for all answer, sat down again and grasped my arm. “Make him at any rate come to you.” I stared. “To _me?_” I had a sudden fear of what she might do. “‘Him’?” “He ought to _be_ here—he ought to help.” I quickly rose, and I think I must have shown her a queerer face than ever yet. “You see me asking him for a visit?” No, with her eyes on my face she evidently couldn’t. Instead of it even—as a woman reads another—she could see what I myself saw: his derision, his amusement, his contempt for the breakdown of my resignation at being left alone and for the fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention to my slighted charms. She didn’t know—no one knew—how proud I had been to serve him and to stick to our terms; yet she nonetheless took the measure, I think, of the warning I now gave her. “If you should so lose your head as to appeal to him for me—” She was really frightened. “Yes, miss?” “I would leave, on the spot, both him and you.” XIII