I'm not his keeper.

And, I'm glad to say, I'm not the lady's keeper either.

Ah, me! It's a bad business.
You can't touch pitch and not be defiled, my dear.

If your mother wanted the Clock House, I would sooner have taken it for her myself than that all this should have happened,--for the family's sake." But Miss Stanbury, when she was alone, and when she had read her niece's three letters again and again, began to understand something of Priscilla's honesty, and began also to perceive that there might have been a great difficulty respecting the Colonel, for which neither her niece nor her sister-in-law could fairly be held to be responsible.

It was perhaps the plainest characteristic of all the Stanburys that they were never wilfully dishonest.