“Yes, I found a place.”
“A lady’s-maid’s place?—as you said.”
Jessy turned her face to the wall, and never spoke.
“Now, this won’t do,” cried Miss Susan, not choosing to be thwarted: and no doubt Jessy, hearing the determined tone, felt something like a reed in her hands. “Just you tell me a little.”
“I am very ill, Susan; I can’t talk much,” was the pleading excuse. “If you’d only let me be quiet.”
“It will no more hurt you to say in a few words where you have been than to make excuses,” persisted Miss Susan, giving a flick to the skirt of her new puce silk gown. “Your conduct altogether has been most extraordinary, quite baffling to us at home, and I must hear some explanation of it.”
“The place I went to was too hard for me,” said Jessy after a pause, speaking out of the pillow.
“Too hard!”
“Yes; too hard. My heart was breaking with its hardness, and I couldn’t stop in it. Oh, be merciful to me, Susan! don’t ask any more.”
Susan Page thought that when mysterious answers like these were creeping out, there was all the greater need that she should ask for more.