and a trifle austere. While Pemberton guessed at these dim young things,
shadows of shadows, he was partly drawn on and partly checked, as for a
scruple, by the charm of attempting to sound the little cool shallows
that were so quickly growing deeper. When he tried to figure to himself
the morning twilight of childhood, so as to deal with it safely, he saw
it was never fixed, never arrested, that ignorance, at the instant he
touched it, was already flushing faintly into knowledge, that there was
nothing that at a given moment you could say an intelligent child didn't
know. It seemed to him that he himself knew too much to imagine Morgan's
simplicity and too little to disembroil his tangle.

The boy paid no heed to his last remark; he only went on: "I'd have
spoken to them about their idea, as I call it, long ago, if I hadn't been
sure what they'd say."

"And what would they say?"

"Just what they said about what poor Zenobie told me--that it was a
horrid dreadful story, that they had paid her every penny they owed her."

"Well, perhaps they had," said Pemberton.

"Perhaps they've paid you!"

"Let us pretend they have, and n'en parlons plus."

"They accused her of lying and cheating"--Morgan stuck to historic truth.
"That's why I don't want to speak to them."

"Lest they should accuse me, too?" To this Morgan made no answer, and