to be able to spit venom at, if only once, in perfect liberty. The
presence of the young man at her back increased both her satisfaction and
her rage. But the very violence of the attack seemed to defeat its end
by rendering the representative victim as it were insensible. The cause
of this outrage naturally escaping the girl's imagination her attitude
was in effect that of dense, hopeless stupidity. And it is a fact that
the worst shocks of life are often received without outcries, without
gestures, without a flow of tears and the convulsions of sobbing. The
insatiable governess missed these signs exceedingly. This pitiful
stolidity was only a fresh provocation. Yet the poor girl was deadly
pale.

"I was cold," she used to explain to Mrs. Fyne. "I had had time to get
terrified. She had pushed her face so near mine and her teeth looked as
though she wanted to bite me. Her eyes seemed to have become quite dry,
hard and small in a lot of horrible wrinkles. I was too afraid of her to
shudder, too afraid of her to put my fingers to my ears. I didn't know
what I expected her to call me next, but when she told me I was no better
than a beggar--that there would be no more masters, no more servants, no
more horses for me--I said to myself: Is that all? I should have laughed
if I hadn't been too afraid of her to make the least little sound."

It seemed that poor Flora had to know all the possible phases of that
sort of anguish, beginning with instinctive panic, through the bewildered
stage, the frozen stage and the stage of blanched apprehension, down to
the instinctive prudence of extreme terror--the stillness of the mouse.
But when she heard herself called the child of a cheat and a swindler,
the very monstrous unexpectedness of this caused in her a revulsion
towards letting herself go. She screamed out all at once "You mustn't
speak like this of Papa!"