It would have been perhaps
better for Flora if he had been a mere brute. But he set about his
sinister enterprise in a sentimental, cautious, almost paternal manner;
and thought he would be safe with a pretty orphan. The girl for all her
experience was still too innocent, and indeed not yet sufficiently aware
of herself as a woman, to mistrust these masked approaches. She did not
see them, in fact. She thought him sympathetic--the first expressively
sympathetic person she had ever met. She was so innocent that she could
not understand the fury of the German woman. For, as you may imagine,
the wifely penetration was not to be deceived for any great length of
time--the more so that the wife was older than the husband. The man with
the peculiar cowardice of respectability never said a word in Flora's
defence. He stood by and heard her reviled in the most abusive terms,
only nodding and frowning vaguely from time to time. It will give you
the idea of the girl's innocence when I say that at first she actually
thought this storm of indignant reproaches was caused by the discovery of
her real name and her relation to a convict.
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