r to understanding it by asking something
before you go on. Did she show any attachment to you, when you were both
at Windygates?"

"Not the least. She appeared to be incapable of attachment to me, or to
any body."

"Did she write any more questions on her slate?"

"Yes. She wrote another question under what she had written just before.
Her mind was still running on my fainting fit, and on the 'man' who had
'brought me to it.' She held up the slate; and the words were these:
'Tell me how he served you, did he knock you down?' Most people would
have laughed at the question. _I_ was startled by it. I told her, No.
She shook her head as if she didn't believe me. She wrote on her slate,
'We are loth to own it when they up with their fists and beat us--ain't
we?' I said, 'You are quite wrong.' She went on obstinately with her
writing. 'Who is the man?'--was her next question. I had control enough
over myself to decline telling her that. She opened the door, and
pointed to me to go out. I made a sign entreating her to wait a
little. She went back, in her impenetrable way, to the writing on the
slate--still about the 'man.' This time, the question was plainer still.
She had evidently placed her own interpretation of my appearance at the
house. She wrote, 'Is it the man who lodges here?' I saw that she would
close the door on me if I didn't answer. My only chance with her was
to own that she had guessed right. I said 'Yes. I want to see him.' She
took me by the arm, as roughly as before--and led me into the house."

"I begin to understand her," said Sir Patrick. "I remember hearing, in
my brother's time, that she had been brutally ill-used by her husband.
The association of id eas, even in _her_ confused brain, becomes plain,
if you bear that in mind. What is her last remembrance of you? It is the
remembrance of a fainting woman at Windygates."

"Yes."

"She makes you acknowledge that she has guessed right, in guessing that
a man was, in some way, answerable for the condition in which she found
you. A swoon produced by a shock indicted on the mind, is a swoon that
she doesn't understand. She looks back into her own experience, and
associates it with the exercise of actual physical brutality on the part
of the man. And she sees, in you, a reflection of her own sufferings
and her own case. It's curious--to a student of human nature. And it
explains, what is otherwise unintelligible--her overlooking her own
instructions to