"Oh you _haven't_ told him?" cried Mrs. Moreen with a pacifying hand on
her well-dressed bosom.

"Without warning you? For what do you take me?" the young man returned.

Mr. and Mrs. Moreen looked at each other; he could see that they
appreciated, as tending to their security, his superstition of delicacy,
and yet that there was a certain alarm in their relief. "My dear
fellow," Mr. Moreen demanded, "what use can you have, leading the quiet
life we all do, for such a lot of money?"--a question to which Pemberton
made no answer, occupied as he was in noting that what passed in the mind
of his patrons was something like: "Oh then, if we've felt that the
child, dear little angel, has judged us and how he regards us, and we
haven't been betrayed, he must have guessed--and in short it's
_general_!" an inference that rather stirred up Mr. and Mrs. Moreen, as
Pemberton had desired it should. At the same time, if he had supposed
his threat would do something towards bringing them round, he was
disappointed to find them taking for granted--how vulgar their perception
_had_ been!--that he had already given them away. There was a mystic
uneasiness in their parental breasts, and that had been the inferior
sense of it. None the less however, his threat did touch them; for if
they had escaped it was only to meet a new danger. Mr. Moreen appealed
to him, on every precedent, as a man of the world; but his wife had
recourse, for the first time since his domestication with them, to a fine
hauteur, reminding him that a devoted mother, with her child, had arts
that protected her against gross misrepresentation.

"I should misrepresent you grossly if I accused you of common honesty!"
our friend replied; but as he closed the door behind him sharply,
thinking he had not done himself much good, while Mr. Moreen lighted