was clear to him. What was it, to speak plainly, that
Mr. Croy had originally done?

"I don't know and I don't want to. I only
know that years and years ago when I was about
fifteen something or other happened that made
him impossible. I mean impossible for the world at
large first, and then, little by little, for mother. We
of course didn't know it at the time," Kate ex
plained, "but we knew it later; and it was, oddly
enough, my sister who first made out that he had
done something. I can hear her now the way,
one cold, black Sunday morning when, on account
of an extraordinary fog, we had not gone to church,
she broke it to me by the school-room fire. I was
reading a history-book by the lamp when we
didn't go to church we had to read history-books
and I suddenly heard her say, out of the fog, which
was in the room, and apropos of nothing: Papa
has done something wicked. And the curious thing
was that I believed it on the spot and have believed
it ever since, though she could tell me nothing
more neither what was the wickedness, nor how
she knew, nor what would happen to him, nor any
thing else about it. We had our sense, always, that
all sorts of things had happened, were all the while
happening, to him; so that when Marian only said
she was sure, tremendously sure, that she had made
it out for herself, but that that was enough, I took
her word for it it seemed somehow so natural.
We were not, however, to ask mother which made

[[75]]

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v?