“Yes, it’s quite true. I told her she couldn’t stay.”

“But why?”

“I had my reasons, I assure you.”

“But it’s absurd to say we can’t afford her wage! She’s well worth it — Gerald likes her enormously —”

“That was only the reason I gave her. It wasn’t the real reason.”

“What was that?”

“Do you really need me to tell you?” Her voice sharpened to the pitch in which, at meetings of this or that, she usually called some errant speaker to order. “Has it ever occurred to you that people aren’t always what they seem? I was far too trusting to take that girl without the usual inquiries, but I was relying — foolishly, no doubt — on your own assurance. I might have guessed how little you really knew of her. And I must say, too, that I didn’t take to her, even from the first.”

Jessica was like that. She had a way of finding that she didn’t like people and then of saying that she never had liked them — thus imputing clairvoyance to herself and vaguely sinister attributes to her victims.

“I don’t quite know, Jessie, what you’re driving at.”

“Oh, you don’t? I’m glad you admit it. You don’t know, I suppose, that this girl was on the stage a few months back, doing a dance turn in fifth-rate shows? And you don’t know that she was dismissed because she tried to commit suicide!”

“Oh yes,” said David, simply, “I knew all that.”

Quite unconscious of having spoiled Jessica’s moment, his only thought was a reassuring one — that if that was all the trouble, what could the fuss be about?

Jessica’s voice keyed up another half-tone. “So you knew? And you never told me?”

“I never like to gossip about a patient’s private affairs.”

“How very considerate to your patients! But hardly to your family! Did you really think a suicidal stage dancer — and a foreigner, at that — was the kind of person to have in a respectable household and look after a nervous child?”

David blinked a little, thinking of Leni and of how silly it was to try to pin down the truth about people in words, because the words could all be true and yet have no truth in them. “She’s all right, my dear,” he said quietly.

“You call her all right? … I’ve no patience with you, David. Apart from the risk of heaven knows what, don’t you think there’s enough scandal all over the town now that this story’s got about? Do you know she once appeared on the stage at the theatre here?”

“Yes, that was where she broke her wrist last December, I attended her.”

“Well, really! You knew all that and didn’t say a thing!”

David was silent, and Jessica too. After a long pause she commented: “A queer business. Right from the first moment I was certain there was something queer about it.”

“But there isn’t.”

“There must be, if she’s the sort that tries to commit suicide.”