La historia continuada por la señora Catherick

directly,” says she, “or I’ll make it the worse for you. I’ll let out your Secret. I can ruin you for life if I choose to open my lips.” My own words!⁠—repeated exactly from what I had said the day before⁠—repeated, in his presence, as if they had come from herself. He sat speechless, as white as the paper I am writing on, while I pushed her out of the room. When he recovered himself⁠— > > No! I am too respectable a woman to mention what he said when he recovered himself. My pen is the pen of a member of the rector’s congregation, and a subscriber to the “Wednesday lectures on Justification by Faith”⁠—how can you expect me to employ it in writing bad language? Suppose, for yourself, the raging, swearing frenzy of the lowest ruffian in England, and let us get on together, as fast as may be, to the way in which it all ended. > > It ended, as you probably guess by this time, in his insisting on securing his own safety by shutting her up. > > I tried to set things right. I told him that she had merely repeated, like a parrot, the words she had heard me say and that she knew no particulars whatever, because I had mentioned none. I explained that she had affected, out of crazy spite against him, to know what she really did not know⁠—that she only wanted to threaten him and aggravate him for speaking to her as he had just spoken⁠—and that my unlucky words gave her just the chance of doing mischief of which she was in search. I referred him to other queer ways of hers, and to his own experience of the vagaries of half-witted people⁠—it was all to no purpose⁠—he would not believe me on my oath⁠—he was