the conventions, had stood by, openly listening
to what they were saying, and when she heard the doctor say that Mrs.
Clutters was dying, she let a howl out of her that startled them. The
doctor turned to her quickly.

"Hold your tongue," he said, "or she'll hear you. Anybody 'ud think you
were dying by the noise you're making!"

Magnolia blubbered away. "I 'ate to 'ear of anybody dyin'," she said. "I
never been in a 'ouse before where it's 'appened, an' besides she's been
good to me!" Her mind wandered off at a tangent "Any'ow," she said,
wiping her eyes, "I done me best. No one can't never say I ain't done me
best, an' the best can't do no more!"

"Has she got any friends, Magnolia?..."

It seemed to them to be extraordinary that this woman had lived in their
house, had worked and cared for them, and yet was so much a stranger to
them that now, in this time of her coming dissolution, they did not know
where her friends were to be found, whether indeed, she had any friends.
"That's very English," Henry thought; "in Ireland we know all about our
servants!"

"Well, I _think_ 'e's 'er 'usband," Magnolia replied. "Any'ow, 'e was
drunk when 'e come!..."

They had assumed that Mrs. Clutters was a widow, a childless widow....

"I've seen 'im 'angin' about two-three times, an' when I said to 'er,
'Mrs. Clutters, there's your friend 'angin' about the corner of the
street, she tole me to mind me own business, an' then she 'urried out.
Of course, it 'adn't got nothink to do with me, 'oo 'e was, an' when she
tole me to mind me own business, I took the 'int...."

"Do you know where he lives?" Gilbert asked.

"No, sir, I don't. When she told me to mind me own business!..."

The approach of Death had made Magnolia amazingly garrulous. She said
more to them that morning than she had said to them all the rest of the
time she had been in their service ... and mixed up with her
reminiscences of what Mrs. Clutters had said to her and what she had
said to Mrs. Clutters, there was a continual statement of her fear and
dislike of death, followed by the assertion that no one 'ad ever died in
a house she'd worked in before.

"You'd think she was blaming us for it," Gilbert said afterwards.

"Well, you'd better go and ask her to tell you where her husband lives,"
Henry said to her, but she shrunk away from him when he said that.

"Oh, I couldn't go near no one what was dyin'," she said. "I ain't used
to it, an' I don't like it!"