Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/338

 He was stirred to a moment of heat, "What are you talking about, Hetty? By God, I never refused Flora anything she wanted. If you call that the easiest way!"

She flared up in a momentary impatience at his denseness, but wasted no words on an issue no longer vital.

"Well, I think you'd better tell Marise," she repeated stubbornly.

He set this on one side for a moment as irrelevant, and said, "All I want to know from you is whether you've ever seen a sign in her to make you think she had heard anything. Did you ever notice when she speaks of her mother … or whether she doesn't speak?"

She scorned, as he knew she would, coloring the truth to win a point, "No, I never did," she stated honestly.

"Well then, that's all I wanted to know. I know you'd have seen it, if it were there, she's been so much with you."

"But I think you ought to tell her," she persisted.

"Why, under the Heavens, why?" he asked. "Why put ideas in her head, if she's perfectly all right?"

"I think everybody ought to know about everything," she answered sweepingly, "and they're not perfectly all right unless they do. At least, if she has heard anything, she ought to know that you don't blame Flora, that you don't think there was anything but talk. You could talk it over with her, get it out into the light."

"It would be poisoning her mind against her mother to mention it."

"I don't believe," Cousin Hetty held to her point steadily, pale, very much in earnest, "I don't believe that the truth can poison anybody's mind."

"Well, I believe in using ordinary horse-sense about everything," he said conclusively, with a peremptory accent.

Cousin Hetty fell back from this brute assertion of his authority.

"You'd made up your mind what to do before you ever spoke to me," she told him, not without bitterness.

"That isn't fair, I didn't know enough to make up my mind. You told me what I needed to know," he answered.