ght
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."

I turned this over. "But of what?"

"He never told me! But please, miss," said Mrs. Grose, "I must get to my
work."

III

Her thus turning her back on me was fortunately not, for my just
preoccupations, a snub that could check the growth of our mutual esteem.
We met, after I had brought home little Miles, more intimately than ever
on the ground of my stupefaction, my general emotion: so monstrous was I
then ready to pronounce it that such a child as had now been revealed to
me should be under an interdict. I was a little late on the scene, and
I felt, as he stood wistfully looking out for me before the door of the
inn at which the coach had put him down, that I had seen him, on the
instant, without and within, in the great glow of freshness, the same
positive fragrance of purity, in which I had, from the first moment,
seen his little sister. He was incredibly beautiful, and Mrs. Grose had
put her finger on it: everything but a sort of passion of tenderness for
him was swept away by his presence. What I then and there took him to
my heart for was something divine that I have never found to the same
degree in any child--his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in
the world but love. It would have been impossible to carry a bad name
with a greater sweetness of innocence, and by the time I had got back to
Bly with him I remained merely bewildered--so far, that is, as I was not
outraged--by the sense of the horrible letter locked up in my room, in
a drawer. As soon as I could compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I