“All out?” My companion stared. “But what, Miss?”
“Everything. It doesn’t matter. I’ve made up my mind. I came home, my dear,” I went on, “for a talk with Miss Jessel.”
I had by this time formed the habit of having Mrs. Grose literally well in hand in advance of my sounding that note; so that even now, as she bravely blinked under the signal of my word, I could keep her comparatively firm. “A talk! Do you mean she spoke?”
“It came to that. I found her, on my return, in the schoolroom.”
“And what did she say?” I can hear the good woman still, and the candour of her stupefaction.
“That she suffers the torments———!”
It was this, of a truth, that made her, as she filled out my picture, gape. “Do you mean,” she faltered, “—of the lost?”
“Of the lost. Of the damned. And that’s why, to share them———” I faltered myself with the horror of it.
But my companion, with less imagination, kept me up. “To share them———?”
“She wants Flora.” Mrs. Grose might, as I gave it to her, fairly have fallen away from me
