She looked at me hard as I musingly pulled up. “His having been here and the time they were with him?”
“The time they were with him, and his name, his presence, his history, in any way.”
“Oh, the little lady doesn’t remember. She never heard or knew.”
“The circumstances of his death?” I thought with some intensity. “Perhaps not. But Miles would remember—Miles would know.”
“Ah, don’t try him!” broke from Mrs. Grose.
I returned her the look she had given me. “Don’t be afraid.” I continued to think. “It is rather odd.”
“That he has never spoken of him?”
“Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were ‘great friends’?”
“Oh, it wasn’t him !” Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. “It was Quint’s own fancy. To play with him, I mean—to spoil him.” She paused a moment; then she added: “Quint was much too free.”
This gave me, straight from my vision of his face— such a face!—a sudden sickness of disgust. “Too free with my boy?”
“Too free with everyone!”
I forbore, for the moment, to analyze this description further than by the reflection that a part of it applied to several of the members of the household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still of our small colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension, in the lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions, had ever,