I found I had no need to think. “No.” She gazed in deeper wonder. “No.”
“Then nobody about the place? Nobody from the village?”
“Nobody—nobody. I didn’t tell you, but I made sure.”
She breathed a vague relief: this was, oddly, so much to the good. It only went indeed a little way. “But if he isn’t a gentleman—”
“What is he? He’s a horror.”
“A horror?”
“He’s—God help me if I know what he is!”
Mrs. Grose looked round once more; she fixed her eyes on the duskier distance, then, pulling herself together, turned to me with abrupt inconsequence. “It’s time we should be at church.”
“Oh, I’m not fit for church!”
“Won’t it do you good?”
“It won’t do them —!” I nodded at the house.
“The children?”
“I can’t leave them now.”
“You’re afraid—?”
I spoke boldly. “I’m afraid of him .”
Mrs. Grose’s large face showed me, at this, for the first time, the faraway faint glimmer of a consciousness more acute: I somehow made out in it the delayed dawn of an idea I myself had not given her and that