Mrs. Verrian deferred a matter that would ordinarily have interested her supremely to an immediate curiosity.  “And how came she to think you would know so much about Miss Shirley?”

Verrian frowned.  “I think from Miss Macroyd.  Miss Macroyd seems to have taken a grandmotherly concern in my affairs through the whole week.  Perhaps she resented having behaved so piggishly at the station the day we came, and meant to take it out of Miss Shirley and myself.  She had seen us together in the woods, one day, and she must have told it about.  Mrs. Westangle wouldn’t have spoken of us together, because she never speaks of anything unless it is going to count; and there was no one else who knew of our acquaintance.”

“Why, my son, if you went walking in the woods with the girl, any one might have seen you.”

“I didn’t.  It was quite by accident that we met there.  Miss Shirley was anxious to keep her presence in the house a secret from everybody.”

Mrs. Verrian would not take any but the open way, with this.  She would not deal indirectly, with it, or in any wise covertly or surreptitiously.  “It seems to me that Miss Shirley has rather a fondness for secrecy,” she said.

“I think she has,” Verrian admitted.  “Though, in this case, it was essential to the success of her final scheme.  But she is a curious study.  I suppose that timidity is at the bottom of all fondness for secrecy, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.  She doesn’t seem to be timid in everything.”

“Say it out, mother!” Verrian challenged her with a smile.  “You’re not timid, anyway!”

“She had the courage to join in that letter, but not the courage to own her part in it.  She was brave enough to confess that she had been sick of a nervous fever from the answer you wrote to the Brown girl, but she wouldn’t have been brave enough to confess anything at all if she had believed she would be physically or morally strong enough to keep it.”

“Perhaps nobody—­nobody but you, mother—­is brave in the right time and place.”

She knew that this was not meant in irony.  “I am glad you say that, Philip.”

“It’s only your due.  But aren’t you a little too hard upon cowards, at times?  For the sort of person she is, if you infer the sort from the worst appearance she has made in the whole business, I think she has done pretty well.”

“Why had she left the Brown girl to take all your resentment alone for the last six or eight months?”

“She may have thought that she was getting her share of the punishment in the fever my resentment brought on?”

“Philip, do you really believe that her fever, if she had one, came from that?”

“I think she believes it, and there’s no doubt but she was badly scared.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt of that!”

“But come, mother, why should we take her at the worst?  Of course, she has a complex nature.  I see that as clearly as you do.  I don’t believe we look at her diversely, in the smallest particular.  But why shouldn’t a complex nature be credited with the same impulses towards the truth as a single nature?  Why shouldn’t we allow that Miss Shirley had the same wish to set herself right with me as Miss Andrews would have had in her place?”