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.”