Mrs. Grose appeared to try to be conscientious. “About some
things--yes.”
“But not about all?”
Again she considered. “Well, Miss--she’s gone. I won’t tell
tales.”
“I quite understand your feeling,” I hastened to reply; but I
thought it, after an instant, not opposed to this concession to pursue:
“Did she die here?”
“No--she went off.”
I don’t know what there was in this brevity of Mrs. Grose’s that
struck me as ambiguous. “Went off to die?” Mrs. Grose looked
straight out of the window, but I felt that, hypothetically, I had
a right to know what young persons engaged for Bly were expected to
do. “She was taken ill, you mean, and went home?”
“She was not taken ill, so far as appeared, in this house. She
left it, at the end of the year, to go home, as she said, for a short
holiday, to which the time she had put in had certainly given her a
right. We had then a young woman--a nursemaid who had stayed on and
who was a good girl and clever; and _she_ took the children altogether
for the interval. But our young lady never came back, and at the
very moment I was expecting her I heard from the master that she was
dead.”