, and when I thought of the chance there might be of her repeating
my words in the town, and mentioning HIS name in connection with them,
if inquisitive people got hold of her, I was finely terrified at the
possible consequences. My worst fears for myself, my worst dread of
what he might do, led me no farther than this. I was quite unprepared
for what really did happen only the next day.

On that next day, without any warning to me to expect him, he came to
the house.

His first words, and the tone in which he spoke them, surly as it was,
showed me plainly enough that he had repented already of his insolent
answer to my application, and that he had come in a mighty bad temper
to try and set matters right again before it was too late. Seeing my
daughter in the room with me (I had been afraid to let her out of my
sight after what had happened the day before) he ordered her away.
They neither of them liked each other, and he vented the ill-temper on
HER which he was afraid to show to ME.

"Leave us," he said, looking at her over his shoulder. She looked back
over HER shoulder and waited as if she didn't care to go. "Do you
hear?" he roared out, "leave the room." "Speak to me civilly," says
she, getting red in the face. "Turn the idiot out," says he, looking
my way. She had always had crazy notions of her own about her dignity,
and that word "idiot" upset her in a moment. Before I could interfere
she stepped up to him in a fine passion. "Beg my pardon, 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 ri