"Oh no, ma'am: oh no. Nobody used to see him then, save the doctor, and that. I was here the best part of a week, mending gowns for Mrs. Stone, and making her a new one. It was only about a fortnight before the Squire died." Ella sighed. Priscilla Peyton, bending over her work, spoke again. "I used to think, sitting in Mrs. Stone's parlour, how much I should like to see him once again; yes, I did, ma'am. I said so one day to Eliza; and she answered me that I might just as well wish to see the inside of the moon--that for months and months nobody had been admitted to see the Squire but those that had the pass-keys." Ella, looking up from her work, stared at the neat brown hair and the neat white cap of the young woman, bending over hers, as if she were asking some solution to the words. "Pass-keys?" she repeated. "What were they?" "Keys that would open the green baize doors which the Squire had put up to shut out his rooms from the rest of the house, and which were always kept locked night and day, ma'am," replied Priscilla. "And who kept these pass-keys?" "There were four of them, ma'am," Priscilla said, "and four people had them, one each. Aaron Stone and poor Mr. Hubert, who is just gone; Dr. Jago had one, and the nurse." Ella paused. "Of what nurse do you speak? My uncle never had a nurse." "Indeed he had, Miss Ella. It was a Mrs. Dexter: sent for from London by Dr. Jago." A nurse from London! This was the first time Miss Winter had heard of the existence of such a person at the Hall. The revelation was not palatable to her. "How long was this Mrs. Dexter at the Hall--do you know, Priscilla?" "It was a good while, ma'am; though I can't say exactly. I think she was here before Christmas--I am next to sure of it. Why yes--I remember now," quickly added the young woman; "she came in November. I was up here one wet November day; and while I was drying my petticoats at the kitchen fire, Phemie whispered to me that she thought the master must be worse, for they had got a London nurse in the house." "Did this nurse remain with my uncle till the last?" "She did, ma'am. She left the day after his death, in May." Miss Winter said no more; she was thinking. Why was the presence of this nurse in the house kept from her?--for kept it assuredly had been. Why and wherefore had the woman's name never been mentioned to her, or the fact of her having been so long at the Hall? Her uncle had not spoken of her in his letters, or Hubert Stone in his notes. "I saw Mrs. Dexter take her departure," resumed Priscilla, as a bit of gossip. "A lovely May morning it was, and I had gone to the station to see my little nephew off by the London train. Mrs. Dexter drove up in a fly, with a trunk and a little black bag that she carried in her hand, and I saw her get into the train. It was but the day after the Squire died; the bells were tolling for him."