Mary gave a little involuntary jump.

"Oh! did she die!" she exclaimed, quite without meaning to.
She had just remembered a French fairy story she had once
read called "Riquet a la Houppe." It had been about a poor
hunchback and a beautiful princess and it had made her
suddenly sorry for Mr. Archibald Craven.

"Yes, she died," Mrs. Medlock answered. "And it
made him queerer than ever. He cares about nobody.
He won't see people. Most of the time he goes away,
and when he is at Misselthwaite he shuts himself up in
the West Wing and won't let any one but Pitcher see him.
Pitcher's an old fellow, but he took care of him when he
was a child and he knows his ways."

It sounded like something in a book and it did not make
Mary feel cheerful. A house with a hundred rooms,
nearly all shut up and with their doors locked--a house on
the edge of a moor--whatsoever a moor was--sounded dreary.
A man with a crooked back who shut himself up also! She
stared out of the window with her lips pinched together,
and it seemed quite natural that the rain should have begun
to pour down in gray slanting lines and splash and stream
down the window-panes. If the pretty wife had been alive
she might have made things cheerful by being something
like her own mother and by running in and out and going
to parties as she had done in frocks "full of lace."
But she was not there any more.