way for the time to the apprehension of ridicule.
But the next day, as the hour for my drive approached, I cropped up in another place. “What was the lady who was here before?”
“The last governess? She was also young and pretty—almost as young and almost as pretty, Miss, even as you.”
“Ah, then, I hope her youth and her beauty helped her!” I recollect throwing off. “He seems to like us young and pretty!”
“Oh, he did,” Mrs. Grose assented: “it was the way he liked everyone!” She had no sooner spoken indeed than she caught herself up. “I mean that’s his way—the master’s.”
I was struck. “But of whom did you speak first?”
She looked blank, but she coloured. “Why, of him.”
“Of the master?”
“Of who else?”
There was so obviously no one else that the next moment I had lost my impression of her having accidentally said more than she meant; and I merely asked what I wanted to know. “Did she see anything in the boy———?”
“That wasn’t right? She never told me.”
