He had known which of our children could be turned into her instrument.

And he had understood, better than I understood myself, that if he had warned me of all this while he lived, my trusting heart would never have believed the people around me capable of it — and so he had let the truth arrive the only way I would accept it, as something I discovered for myself, too late to be fooled and just in time to be saved.

That was the cleverest and the most loving thing in the whole of his design, and it took me a long while to fully appreciate it.

Lawrence had known me for sixty-nine years.