"Of what other things have you got hold?"
"Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet,
at bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me.
Their more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness.
It's a game," I went on; "it's a policy and a fraud!"
"On the part of little darlings--?"
"As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems!"
The very act of bringing it out really helped me to
trace it--follow it all up and piece it all together.
"They haven't been good--they've only been absent.
It has been easy to live with them, because they're simply leading
a life of their own. They're not mine--they're not ours.
They're his and they're hers!"
"Quint's and that woman's?"
"Quint's and that woman's. They want to get to them."
Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs. Grose appeared to study them!
"But for what?"
"For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days,
the pair put into them. And to ply them with that evil still,
to keep up the work of demons, is what brings the others back."
"Laws!" said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was homely, but it
revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the bad time--
for there had been a worse even than this!--must have occurred. There could
have been no such justification for me as the plain assent of her experience
to whatever depth of depravity I found credible in our brace of scoundrels.
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