Of something much worse. Worse than dislike?this left her indeed at a loss. With a determinationindescribable. With a kind of fury of intention. I made her turn pale. Intention? To get hold of her. Mrs. Groseher eyes just lingering on minegave a shudder and walked to the window; and while she stood there looking out I completed my statement. Thats what Flora knows. After a little she turned round. The person was in black, you say? In mourningrather poor, almost shabby. Butyeswith extraordinary beauty. I now recognized to what I had at last, stroke by stroke, brought the victim of my confidence, for she quite visibly weighed this. Oh, handsomevery, very, I insisted; wonderfully handsome. But infamous. She slowly came back to me. Miss Jesselwas infamous. She once more took my hand in both her own, holding it as tight as if to fortify me against the increase of alarm I might draw from this disclosure. They were both infamous, she finally said. So, for a little, we faced it once more together; and I found absolutely a degree of help in seeing it now so straight. I appreciate, I said, the great decency of your not having hitherto spoken; but the time has certainly come to give me the whole thing. She appeared to assent to this, but still only in silence; seeing which I went on I must have it now. Of what did she die? Come, there was something between them. There was everything. In spite of the difference? Oh, of their rank, their conditionshe brought it woefully out. She was a lady. I turned it over; I again saw. Yesshe was a lady. And he so dreadfully below, said Mrs. Grose. I felt that I doubtless neednt press too hard, in such company, on the place of a servant in the scale; but there was nothing to prevent an acceptance of my companions own measure of my predecessors abasement. There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more readily for my full visionon the evidenceof our employers late clever, goodlooking own man; impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved. The fellow was a hound. Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case for a sense of shades. Ive never seen one like him. He did what he wished. With her? With them all. It was as if now in my friends own eyes Miss Jessel had again appeared. I seemed at any rate, for an instant, to see their evocation of her as distinctly as I had seen her by the pond; and I brought out with decision It must have been also what she wished! Mrs. Groses face signified that it had been indeed, but she said at the same time Poor womanshe paid for it! Then you do know what she died of? I asked. NoI know nothing. I wanted not to know; I was glad enough I didnt; and I thanked heaven she was well out of this! Yet you had, then, your idea Of her real reason for leaving? Oh, yesas to that. She couldnt have stayed. Fancy it herefor a governess! And afterward I imaginedand I still imagine. And what I imagine is dreadful. Not so dreadful as what I do, I replied; on which I must have shown heras I was indeed but too consciousa front of miserable defeat. It brought out again all her compassion for me, and at the renewed touch of her kindness my power to resist broke down. I burst, as I had, the other time, made her burst, into tears; she took me to her motherly breast, and my lamentation overflowed. I dont do it! I sobbed in despair; I dont save or shield them! Its far worse than I dreamedtheyre lost! VIII What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough there were in the matter I had put before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution to sound; so that when we met once more in the wonder of it we were of a common mind about the duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We were to keep our heads if we should keep nothing elsedifficult indeed as that might be in the face of what, in our prodigious experience, was least to be questioned. Late that night, while the house slept, we had another talk in my room, when she went all the way with me as to its being beyond doubt that I had seen exactly what I had seen. To hold her perfectly in the pinch of that, I found I had only to ask her how, if I had made it up, I came to be able to give, of each of the persons appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their special marksa portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly recognized and named them. She wished of coursesmall blame to her!to sink the whole subject; and I was quick to assure her that my own interest in it had now violently taken the form of a search for the way to escape from it. I encountered her on the ground of a probability that with recurrencefor recurrence we took for grantedI should get used to my danger, distinctly professing that my personal exposure had suddenly become the least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicion that was intolerable; and yet even to this complication the later hours of the day had brought a little ease. On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned to my pupils, associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense of their charm which I had already found to be a thing I could positively cultivate and which had never failed me yet. I had simply, in other words, plunged afresh into Floras special society and there become awareit was almost a luxury!that she could put her little conscious hand straight upon the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet speculation and then had accused me to my face of having cried. I had supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs but I could literallyfor the time, at all eventsrejoice, under this fathomless charity, that they had not entirely disappeared. To gaze into the depths of blue of the childs eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation. I couldnt abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat to Mrs. Groseas I did there, over and over, in the small hoursthat with their voices in the air, their pressure on ones heart, and their fragrant faces against ones cheek, everything fell to the ground but their incapacity and their beauty. It was a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all, I had equally to reenumerate the signs of subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my show of selfpossession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was a matter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I should have had to quaver out again the reasons for my not having, in my delusion, so much as questioned that the little girl saw our visitant even as I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much as she did thus see, to make me suppose she didnt, and at the same time, without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did! It was a pity that I needed once more to describe the portentous little activity by which she sought to divert my attentionthe perceptible increase of movement, the greater intensity of play, the singing, the gabbling of nonsense, and the invitation to romp. Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort that still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to asseverate to my friend that I was certainwhich was so much to the goodthat I at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have been prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mindI scarce know what to call itto invoke such further aid to intelligence as might spring from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit by bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong side of it all still sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat; and I remember how on this occasionfor the sleeping house and the concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to helpI felt the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain. I dont believe anything so horrible, I recollect saying; no, let us put it definitely, my dear, that I dont. But if I did, you know, theres a thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least bit moreoh, not a scrap, come!to get out of you. What was it you had in mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the letter from his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didnt pretend for him that he had not literally ever been bad? He has not literally ever, in these weeks that I myself have lived with him and so closely watched him; he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful, lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made the claim for him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take. What was your exception, and to what passage in your personal observation of him did you refer? It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and, at any rate, before the gray dawn admonished us to separate I had got my answer. What my friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to the purpose. It was neither more nor less than the circumstance that for a period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually together. It was in fact the very appropriate truth that she had ventured to criticize the propriety, to hint at the incongruity, of so close an alliance, and even to go so far on the subject as a frank overture to Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel had, with a most strange manner, requested her to mind her business, and the good woman had, on this, directly approached little Miles. What she had said to him, since I pressed, was that she liked to see young gentlemen not forget their station. I pressed again, of course, at this. You reminded him that Quint was only a base menial? As you might say! And it was his answer, for one thing, that was bad. And for another thing? I waited. He repeated your words to Quint? No, not that. Its just what he wouldnt! she could still impress upon me. I was sure, at any rate, she added, that he didnt. But he denied certain occasions. What occasions? When they had been about together quite as if Quint were his tutorand a very grand oneand Miss Jessel only for the little lady. When he had gone off with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours with him. He then prevaricated about ithe said he hadnt? Her assent was clear enough to cause me to add in a moment I see. He lied. Oh! Mrs. Grose mumbled. This was a suggestion that it didnt matter; which indeed she backed up by a further remark. You see, after all, Miss Jessel didnt mind. She didnt forbid him. I considered. Did he put that to you as a justification? At this she dropped again. No, he never spoke of it. Never mentioned her in connection with Quint? She saw, visibly flushing, where I was coming out. Well, he didnt show anything. He denied, she repeated; he denied. Lord, how I pressed her now! So that you could see he knew what was between the two wretches? I dont knowI dont know! the poor woman groaned. You do know, you dear thing, I replied; only you havent my dreadful boldness of mind, and you keep back, out of timidity and modesty and delicacy, even the impression that, in the past, when you had, without my aid, to flounder about in silence, most of all made you miserable. But I shall get it out of you yet! There was something in the boy that suggested to you, I continued, that he covered and concealed their relation. Oh, he couldnt prevent Your learning the truth? I daresay! But, heavens, I fell, with vehemence, athinking, what it shows that they must, to that extent, have succeeded in making of him! Ah, nothing thats not nice now! Mrs. Grose lugubriously pleaded. I dont wonder you looked queer, I persisted, when I mentioned to you the letter from his school! I doubt if I looked as queer as you! she retorted with homely force. And if he was so bad then as that comes to, how is he such an angel now? Yes, indeedand if he was a fiend at school! How, how, how? Well, I said in my torment, you must put it to me again, but I shall not be able to tell you for some days. Only, put it to me again! I cried in a way that made my friend stare. There are directions in which I must not for the present let myself go. Meanwhile I returned to her first examplethe one to which she had just previously referredof the boys happy capacity for an occasional slip. If Quinton your remonstrance at the time you speak ofwas a base menial, one of the things Miles said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another. Again her admission was so adequate that I continued And you forgave him that? Wouldnt you? Oh, yes! And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of the oddest amusement. Then I went on At all events, while he was with the man Miss Flora was with the woman. It suited them all! It suited me, too, I felt, only too well; by which I mean that it suited exactly the particularly deadly view I was in the very act of forbidding myself to entertain. But I so far succeeded in checking the expression of this view that I will throw, just here, no further light on it than may be offered by the mention of my final observation to Mrs. Grose. His having lied and been impudent are, I confess, less engaging specimens than I had hoped to have from you of the outbreak in him of the little natural man. Still, I mused, They must do, for they make me feel more than ever that I must watch. It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friends face how much more unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck me as presenting to my own tenderness an occasion for doing. This came out when, at the schoolroom door, she quitted me. Surely you dont accuse him Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me? Ah, remember that, until further evidence, I now accuse nobody. Then, before shutting her out to go, by another passage, to her own place, I must just wait, I wound up. IX I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from my consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant sight of my pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to grievous fancies and even to odious memories a kind of brush of the sponge. I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish grace as a thing I could actively cultivate, and it may be imagined if I neglected now to address myself to this source for whatever it would yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort to struggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have been, however, a greater tension still had it not been so frequently successful. I used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought strange things about them; and the circumstances that these things only made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they were so immensely more interesting. Putting things at the worst, at all events, as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of their innocence could only beblameless and foredoomed as they werea reason the more for taking risks. There were moments when, by an irresistible impulse, I found myself catching them up and pressing them to my heart. As soon as I had done so I used to say to myself What will they think of that? Doesnt it betray too much? It would have been easy to get into a sad, wild tangle about how much I might betray; but the real account, I feel, of the hours of peace that I could still enjoy was that the immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement still effective even under the shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it occurred to me that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of my sharper passion for them, so too I remember wondering if I mightnt see a queerness in the traceable increase of their own demonstrations. They were at this period extravagantly and preternaturally fond of me; which, after all, I could reflect, was no more than a graceful response in children perpetually bowed over and hugged. The homage of which they were so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite as well as if I never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to catch them at a purpose in it. They had never, I think, wanted to do so many things for their poor protectress; I meanthough they got their lessons better and better, which was naturally what would please her mostin the way of diverting, entertaining, surprising her; reading her passages, telling her stories, acting her charades, pouncing out at her, in disguises, as animals and historical characters, and above all astonishing her by the pieces they had secretly got by heart and could interminably recite. I should never get to the bottomwere I to let myself go even nowof the prodigious private commentary, all under still more private correction, with which, in these days, I overscored their full hours. They had shown me from the first a facility for everything, a general faculty which, taking a fresh start, achieved remarkable flights. They got their little tasks as if they loved them, and indulged, from the mere exuberance of the gift, in the most unimposed little miracles of memory. They not only popped out at me as tigers and as Romans, but as Shakespeareans, astronomers, and navigators. This was so singularly the case that it had presumably much to do with the fact as to which, at the present day, I am at a loss for a different explanation I allude to my unnatural composure on the subject of another school for Miles. What I remember is that I was content not, for the time, to open the question, and that contentment must have sprung from the sense of his perpetually striking show of cleverness. He was too clever for a bad governess, for a parsons daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not the brightest thread in the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the impression I might have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was under some influence operating in his small intellectual life as a tremendous incitement. If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone school, it was at least as marked that for such a boy to have been kicked out by a schoolmaster was a mystification without end. Let me add that in their company nowand I was careful almost never to be out of itI could follow no scent very far. We lived in a cloud of music and love and success and private theatricals. The musical sense in each of the children was of the quickest, but the elder in especial had a marvelous knack of catching and repeating. The schoolroom piano broke into all gruesome fancies; and when that failed there were confabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of them going out in the highest spirits in order to come in as something new. I had had brothers myself, and it was no revelation to me that little girls could be slavish idolaters of little boys. What surpassed everything was that there was a little boy in the world who could have for the inferior age, sex, and intelligence so fine a consideration. They were extraordinarily at one, and to say that they never either quarreled or complained is to make the note of praise coarse for their quality of sweetness. Sometimes, indeed, when I dropped into coarseness, I perhaps came across traces of little understandings between them by which one of them should keep me occupied while the other slipped away. There is a naive side, I suppose, in all diplomacy; but if my pupils practiced upon me, it was surely with the minimum of grossness. It was all in the other quarter that, after a lull, the grossness broke out. I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge. In going on with the record of what was hideous at Bly, I not only challenge the most liberal faithfor which I little care; butand this is another matterI renew what I myself suffered, I again push my way through it to the end. There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, the affair seems to me to have been all pure suffering; but I have at least reached the heart of it, and the straightest road out is doubtless to advance. One eveningwith nothing to lead up or to prepare itI felt the cold touch of the impression that had breathed on me the night of my arrival and which, much lighter then, as I have mentioned, I should probably have made little of in memory had my subsequent sojourn been less agitated. I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of candles. There was a roomful of old books at Blylastcentury fiction, some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown, but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached the sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth. I remember that the book I had in my hand was Fieldings Amelia; also that I was wholly awake. I recall further both a general conviction that it was horribly late and a particular objection to looking at my watch. I figure, finally, that the white curtain draping, in the fashion of those days, the head of Floras little bed, shrouded, as I had assured myself long before, the perfection of childish rest. I recollect in short that, though I was deeply interested in my author, I found myself, at the turn of a page and with his spell all scattered, looking straight up from him and hard at the door of my room. There was a moment during which I listened, reminded of the faint sense I had had, the first night, of there being something undefinably astir in the house, and noted the soft breath of the open casement just move the halfdrawn blind. Then, with all the marks of a deliberation that must have seemed magnificent had there been anyone to admire it, I laid down my book, rose to my feet, and, taking a candle, went straight out of the room and, from the passage, on which my light made little impression, noiselessly closed and locked the door. I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I went straight along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came within sight of the tall window that presided over the great turn of the staircase. At this point I precipitately found myself aware of three things. They were practically simultaneous, yet they had flashes of succession. My candle, under a bold flourish, went out, and I perceived, by the uncovered window, that the yielding dusk of earliest morning rendered it unnecessary. Without it, the next instant, I saw that there was someone on the stair. I speak of sequences, but I required no lapse of seconds to stiffen myself for a third encounter with Quint. The apparition had reached the landing halfway up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window, where at sight of me, it stopped short and fixed me exactly as it had fixed me from the tower and from the garden. He knew me as well as I knew him; and so, in the cold, faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glass and another on the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence. But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve this distinction for quite another circumstance the circumstance that dread had unmistakably quitted me and that there was nothing in me there that didnt meet and measure him. I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had, thank God, no terror. And he knew I had notI found myself at the end of an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor of confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should ceasefor the time, at leastto have him to reckon with; and during the minute, accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview hideous just because it was human, as human as to have met alone, in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer, some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed, in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved. The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to make me doubt if even I were in life. I cant express what followed it save by saying that the silence itselfwhich was indeed in a manner an attestation of my strengthbecame the element into which I saw the figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness in which the next bend was lost. X I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect presently of understanding that when my visitor had gone, he had gone then I returned to my room. The foremost thing I saw there by the light of the candle I had left burning was that Floras little bed was empty; and on this I caught my breath with all the terror that, five minutes before, I had been able to resist. I dashed at the place in which I had left her lying and over which (for the small silk counterpane and the sheets were disarranged) the white curtains had been deceivingly pulled forward; then my step, to my unutterable relief, produced an answering sound I perceived an agitation of the window blind, and the child, ducking down, emerged rosily from the other side of it. She stood there in so much of her candor and so little of her nightgown, with her pink bare feet and the golden glow of her curls. She looked intensely grave, and I had never had such a sense of losing an advantage acquired (the thrill of which had just been so prodigious) as on my consciousness that she addressed me with a reproach. You naughty where have you been?instead of challenging her own irregularity I found myself arraigned and explaining. She herself explained, for that matter, with the loveliest, eagerest simplicity. She had known suddenly, as she lay there, that I was out of the room, and had jumped up to see what had become of me. I had dropped, with the joy of her reappearance, back into my chairfeeling then, and then only, a little faint; and she had pattered straight over to me, thrown herself upon my knee, given herself to be held with the flame of the candle full in the wonderful little face that was still flushed with sleep. I remember closing my eyes an instant, yieldingly, consciously, as before the excess of something beautiful that shone out of the blue of her own. You were looking for me out of the window? I said. You thought I might be walking in the grounds? Well, you know, I thought someone wasshe never blanched as she smiled out that at me. Oh, how I looked at her now! And did you see anyone? Ah, no! she returned, almost with the full privilege of childish inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long sweetness in her little drawl of the negative. At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed she lied; and if I once more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle of the three or four possible ways in which I might take this up. One of these, for a moment, tempted me with such singular intensity that, to withstand it, I must have gripped my little girl with a spasm that, wonderfully, she submitted to without a cry or a sign of fright. Why not break out at her on the spot and have it all over?give it to her straight in her lovely little lighted face? You see, you see, you know that you do and that you already quite suspect I believe it; therefore, why not frankly confess it to me, so that we may at least live with it together and learn perhaps, in the strangeness of our fate, where we are and what it means? This solicitation dropped, alas, as it came if I could immediately have succumbed to it I might have spared myselfwell, youll see what. Instead of succumbing I sprang again to my feet, looked at her bed, and took a helpless middle way. Why did you pull the curtain over the place to make me think you were still there? Flora luminously considered; after which, with her little divine smile Because I dont like to frighten you! But if I had, by your idea, gone out? She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or ninetimesnine. Oh, but you know, she quite adequately answered, that you might come back, you dear, and that you have! And after a little, when she had got into bed, I had, for a long time, by almost sitting on her to hold her hand, to prove that I recognized the pertinence of my return. You may imagine the general complexion, from that moment, of my nights. I repeatedly sat up till I didnt know when; I selected moments when my roommate unmistakably slept, and, stealing out, took noiseless turns in the passage and even pushed as far as to where I had last met Quint. But I never met him there again; and I may as well say at once that I on no other occasion saw him in the house. I just missed, on the staircase, on the other hand, a different adventure. Looking down it from the top I once recognized the presence of a woman seated on one of the lower steps with her back presented to me, her body halfbowed and her head, in an attitude of woe, in her hands. I had been there but an instant, however, when she vanished without looking round at me. I knew, nonetheless, exactly what dreadful face she had to show; and I wondered whether, if instead of being above I had been below, I should have had, for going up, the same nerve I had lately shown Quint. Well, there continued to be plenty of chance for nerve. On the eleventh night after my latest encounter with that gentlemanthey were all numbered nowI had an alarm that perilously skirted it and that indeed, from the particular quality of its unexpectedness, proved quite my sharpest shock. It was precisely the first night during this series that, weary with watching, I had felt that I might again without laxity lay myself down at my old hour. I slept immediately and, as I afterward knew, till about one oclock; but when I woke it was to sit straight up, as completely roused as if a hand had shook me. I had left a light burning, but it was now out, and I felt an instant certainty that Flora had extinguished it. This brought me to my feet and straight, in the darkness, to her bed, which I found she had left. A glance at the window enlightened me further, and the striking of a match completed the picture. The child had again got upthis time blowing out the taper, and had again, for some purpose of observation or response, squeezed in behind the blind and was peering out into the night. That she now sawas she had not, I had satisfied myself, the previous timewas proved to me by the fact that she was disturbed neither by my reillumination nor by the haste I made to get into slippers and into a wrap. Hidden, protected, absorbed, she evidently rested on the sillthe casement opened forwardand gave herself up. There was a great still moon to help her, and this fact had counted in my quick decision. She was face to face with the apparition we had met at the lake, and could now communicate with it as she had not then been able to do. What I, on my side, had to care for was, without disturbing her, to reach, from the corridor, some other window in the same quarter. I got to the door without her hearing me; I got out of it, closed it, and listened, from the other side, for some sound from her.


While I stood in the passage I had my eyes on her brothers door, which was but ten steps off and which, indescribably, produced in me a renewal of the strange impulse that I lately spoke of as my temptation. What if I should go straight in and march to his window?what if, by risking to his boyish bewilderment a revelation of my motive, I should throw across the rest of the mystery the long halter of my boldness? This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold and pause again. I preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what might portentously be; I wondered if his bed were also empty and he too were secretly at watch. It was a deep, soundless minute, at the end of which my impulse failed. He was quiet; he might be innocent; the risk was hideous; I turned away. There was a figure in the groundsa figure prowling for a sight, the visitor with whom Flora was engaged; but it was not the visitor most concerned with my boy. I hesitated afresh, but on other grounds and only for a few seconds; then I had made my choice. There were empty rooms at Bly, and it was only a question of choosing the right one. The right one suddenly presented itself to me as the lower onethough high above the gardensin the solid corner of the house that I have spoken of as the old tower. This was a large, square chamber, arranged with some state as a bedroom, the extravagant size of which made it so inconvenient that it had not for years, though kept by Mrs. Grose in exemplary order, been occupied. I had often admired it and I knew my way about in it; I had only, after just faltering at the first chill gloom of its disuse, to pass across it and unbolt as quietly as I could one of the shutters. Achieving this transit, I uncovered the glass without a sound and, applying my face to the pane, was able, the darkness without being much less than within, to see that I commanded the right direction. Then I saw something more. The moon made the night extraordinarily penetrable and showed me on the lawn a person, diminished by distance, who stood there motionless and as if fascinated, looking up to where I had appearedlooking, that is, not so much straight at me as at something that was apparently above me. There was clearly another person above methere was a person on the tower; but the presence on the lawn was not in the least what I had conceived and had confidently hurried to meet. The presence on the lawnI felt sick as I made it outwas poor little Miles himself. XI It was not till late next day that I spoke to Mrs. Grose; the rigor with which I kept my pupils in sight making it often difficult to meet her privately, and the more as we each felt the importance of not provokingon the part of the servants quite as much as on that of the childrenany suspicion of a secret flurry or that of a discussion of mysteries. I drew a great security in this particular from her mere smooth aspect. There was nothing in her fresh face to pass on to others my horrible confidences. She believed me, I was sure, absolutely if she hadnt I dont know what would have become of me, for I couldnt have borne the business alone. But she was a magnificent monument to the blessing of a want of imagination, and if she could see in our little charges nothing but their beauty and amiability, their happiness and cleverness, she had no direct communication with the sources of my trouble. If they had been at all visibly blighted or battered, she would doubtless have grown, on tracing it back, haggard enough to match them; as matters stood, however, I could feel her, when she surveyed them, with her large white arms folded and the habit of serenity in all her look, thank the Lords mercy that if they were ruined the pieces would still serve. Flights of fancy gave place, in her mind, to a steady fireside glow, and I had already begun to perceive how, with the development of the conviction thatas time went on without a public accidentour young things could, after all, look out for themselves, she addressed her greatest solicitude to the sad case presented by their instructress. That, for myself, was a sound simplification I could engage that, to the world, my face should tell no tales, but it would have been, in the conditions, an immense added strain to find myself anxious about hers. At the hour I now speak of she had joined me, under pressure, on the terrace, where, with the lapse of the season, the afternoon sun was now agreeable; and we sat there together while, before us, at a distance, but within call if we wished, the children strolled to and fro in one of their most manageable moods. They moved slowly, in unison, below us, over the lawn, the boy, as they went, reading aloud from a storybook and passing his arm round his sister to keep her quite in touch. Mrs. Grose watched them with positive placidity; then I caught the suppressed intellectual creak with which she conscientiously turned to take from me a view of the back of the tapestry. I had made her a receptacle of lurid things, but there was an odd recognition of my superioritymy accomplishments and my functionin her patience under my pain. She offered her mind to my disclosures as, had I wished to mix a witchs broth and proposed it with assurance, she would have held out a large clean saucepan. This had become thoroughly her attitude by the time that, in my recital of the events of the night, I reached the point of what Miles had said to me when, after seeing him, at such a monstrous hour, almost on the very spot where he happened now to be, I had gone down to bring him in; choosing then, at the window, with a concentrated need of not alarming the house, rather that method than a signal more resonant. I had left her meanwhile in little doubt of my small hope of representing with success even to her actual sympathy my sense of the real splendor of the little inspiration with which, after I had got him into the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge. As soon as I appeared in the moonlight on the terrace, he had come to me as straight as possible; on which I had taken his hand without a word and led him, through the dark spaces, up the staircase where Quint had so hungrily hovered for him, along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, and so to his forsaken room. Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wonderedoh, how I had wondered!if he were groping about in his little mind for something plausible and not too grotesque. It would tax his invention, certainly, and I felt, this time, over his real embarrassment, a curious thrill of triumph. It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldnt play any longer at innocence; so how the deuce would he get out of it? There beat in me indeed, with the passionate throb of this question an equal dumb appeal as to how the deuce I should. I was confronted at last, as never yet, with all the risk attached even now to sounding my own horrid note. I remember in fact that as we pushed into his little chamber, where the bed had not been slept in at all and the window, uncovered to the moonlight, made the place so clear that there was no need of striking a matchI remember how I suddenly dropped, sank upon the edge of the bed from the force of the idea that he must know how he really, as they say, had me. He could do what he liked, with all his cleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer to the old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who minister to superstitions and fears. He had me indeed, and in a cleft stick; for who would ever absolve me, who would consent that I should go unhung, if, by the faintest tremor of an overture, I were the first to introduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire? No, no it was useless to attempt to convey to Mrs. Grose, just as it is scarcely less so to attempt to suggest here, how, in our short, stiff brush in the dark, he fairly shook me with admiration. I was of course thoroughly kind and merciful; never, never yet had I placed on his little shoulders hands of such tenderness as those with which, while I rested against the bed, I held him there well under fire. I had no alternative but, in form at least, to put it to him. You must tell me nowand all the truth. What did you go out for? What were you doing there? I can still see his wonderful smile, the whites of his beautiful eyes, and the uncovering of his little teeth shine to me in the dusk. If I tell you why, will you understand? My heart, at this, leaped into my mouth. Would he tell me why? I found no sound on my lips to press it, and I was aware of replying only with a vague, repeated, grimacing nod. He was gentleness itself, and while I wagged my head at him he stood there more than ever a little fairy prince. It was his brightness indeed that gave me a respite. Would it be so great if he were really going to tell me? Well, he said at last, just exactly in order that you should do this. Do what? Think mefor a changebad! I shall never forget the sweetness and gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of it, he bent forward and kissed me. It was practically the end of everything. I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minute in my arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given exactly the account of himself that permitted least of my going behind it, and it was only with the effect of confirming my acceptance of it that, as I presently glanced about the room, I could say Then you didnt undress at all? He fairly glittered in the gloom. Not at all. I sat up and read. And when did you go down? At midnight. When Im bad I am bad! I see, I seeits charming. But how could you be sure I would know it? Oh, I arranged that with Flora. His answers rang out with a readiness! She was to get up and look out. Which is what she did do. It was I who fell into the trap! So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at, you also lookedyou saw. While you, I concurred, caught your death in the night air! He literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford radiantly to assent. How otherwise should I have been bad enough? he asked. Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview closed on my recognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his joke, he had been able to draw upon. XII The particular impression I had received proved in the morning light, I repeat, not quite successfully presentable to Mrs. Grose, though I reinforced it with the mention of still another remark that he had made before we separated. It all lies in half a dozen words, I said to her, words that really settle the matter. Think, you know, what I might do! He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down to the ground what he might do. Thats what he gave them a taste of at school. Lord, you do change! cried my friend. I dont changeI simply make it out. The four, depend upon it, perpetually meet. If on either of these last nights you had been with either child, you would clearly have understood. The more Ive watched and waited the more Ive felt that if there were nothing else to make it sure it would be made so by the systematic silence of each. Never, by a slip of the tongue, have they so much as alluded to either of their old friends, any more than Miles has alluded to his expulsion. Oh, yes, we may sit here and look at them, and they may show off to us there to their fill; but even while they pretend to be lost in their fairytale theyre steeped in their vision of the dead restored. Hes not reading to her, I declared; theyre talking of themtheyre talking horrors! I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and its a wonder Im not. What Ive seen would have made you so; but it has only made me more lucid, made me get hold of still other things. My lucidity must have seemed awful, but the charming creatures who were victims of it, passing and repassing in their interlocked sweetness, gave my colleague something to hold on by; and I felt how tight she held as, without stirring in the breath of my passion, she covered them still with her eyes. Of what other things have you got hold? Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, at bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. Its a game, I went on; its a policy and a fraud! On the part of little darlings? As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems! The very act of bringing it out really helped me to trace itfollow it all up and piece it all together. They havent been goodtheyve only been absent. It has been easy to live with them, because theyre simply leading a life of their own. Theyre not minetheyre not ours. Theyre his and theyre hers! Quints and that womans? Quints and that womans. They want to get to them. Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs. Grose appeared to study them! But for what? For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the work of demons, is what brings the others back. Laws! said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was homely, but it revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the bad timefor there had been a worse even than this!must have occurred. There could have been no such justification for me as the plain assent of her experience to whatever depth of depravity I found credible in our brace of scoundrels. It was in obvious submission of memory that she brought out after a moment They were rascals! But what can they now do? she pursued. Do? I echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed at their distance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at us. Dont they do enough? I demanded in a lower tone, while the children, having smiled and nodded and kissed hands to us, resumed their exhibition. We were held by it a minute; then I answered They can destroy them! At this my companion did turn, but the inquiry she launched was a silent one, the effect of which was to make me more explicit. They dont know, as yet, quite howbut theyre trying hard. Theyre seen only across, as it were, and beyondin strange places and on high places, the top of towers, the roof of houses, the outside of windows, the further edge of pools; but theres a deep design, on either side, to shorten the distance and overcome the obstacle; and the success of the tempters is only a question of time. Theyve only to keep to their suggestions of danger. For the children to come? And perish in the attempt! Mrs. Grose slowly got up, and I scrupulously added Unless, of course, we can prevent! Standing there before me while I kept my seat, she visibly turned things over. Their uncle must do the preventing. He must take them away. And whos to make him? She had been scanning the distance, but she now dropped on me a foolish face. You, miss. By writing to him that his house is poisoned and his little nephew and niece mad? But if they are, miss? And if I am myself, you mean? Thats charming news to be sent him by a governess whose prime undertaking was to give him no worry. Mrs. Grose considered, following the children again. Yes, he do hate worry. That was the great reason Why those fiends took him in so long? No doubt, though his indifference must have been awful. As Im not a fiend, at any rate, I shouldnt take him in. My companion, after an instant and for all answer, sat down again and grasped my arm. Make him at any rate come to you. I stared. To me? I had a sudden fear of what she might do.  Him? He ought to be herehe ought to help. I quickly rose, and I think I must have shown her a queerer face than ever yet. You see me asking him for a visit? No, with her eyes on my face she evidently couldnt. Instead of it evenas a woman reads anothershe could see what I myself saw his derision, his amusement, his contempt for the breakdown of my resignation at being left alone and for the fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention to my slighted charms. She didnt knowno one knewhow proud I had been to serve him and to stick to our terms; yet she nonetheless took the measure, I think, of the warning I now gave her. If you should so lose your head as to appeal to him for me She was really frightened. Yes, miss? I would leave, on the spot, both him and you. XIII It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as much as ever an effort beyond my strengthoffered, in close quarters, difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation continued a month, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the note above all, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the part of my pupils. It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my mere infernal imagination it was absolutely traceable that they were aware of my predicament and that this strange relation made, in a manner, for a long time, the air in which we moved. I dont mean that they had their tongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for that was not one of their dangers I do mean, on the other hand, that the element of the unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater than any other, and that so much avoidance could not have been so successfully effected without a great deal of tacit arrangement. It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each otherfor, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intendedthe doors we had indiscreetly opened. All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground. Forbidden ground was the question of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, in especial, might survive, in memory, of the friends little children had lost. There were days when I could have sworn that one of them had, with a small invisible nudge, said to the other She thinks shell do it this timebut she wont! To do it would have been to indulge for instanceand for once in a wayin some direct reference to the lady who had prepared them for my discipline. They had a delightful endless appetite for passages in my own history, to which I had again and again treated them; they were in possession of everything that had ever happened to me, had had, with every circumstance the story of my smallest adventures and of those of my brothers and sisters and of the cat and the dog at home, as well as many particulars of the eccentric nature of my father, of the furniture and arrangement of our house, and of the conversation of the old women of our village. There were things enough, taking one with another, to chatter about, if one went very fast and knew by instinct when to go round. They pulled with an art of their own the strings of my invention and my memory; and nothing else perhaps, when I thought of such occasions afterward, gave me so the suspicion of being watched from under cover. It was in any case over my life, my past, and my friends alone that we could take anything like our easea state of affairs that led them sometimes without the least pertinence to break out into sociable reminders. I was invitedwith no visible connectionto repeat afresh Goody Goslings celebrated mot or to confirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness of the vicarage pony. It was partly at such junctures as these and partly at quite different ones that, with the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament, as I have called it, grew most sensible. The fact that the days passed for me without another encounter ought, it would have appeared, to have done something toward soothing my nerves. Since the light brush, that second night on the upper landing, of the presence of a woman at the foot of the stair, I had seen nothing, whether in or out of the house, that one had better not have seen. There was many a corner round which I expected to come upon Quint, and many a situation that, in a merely sinister way, would have favored the appearance of Miss Jessel. The summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performanceall strewn with crumpled playbills. There were exactly states of the air, conditions of sound and of stillness, unspeakable impressions of the kind of ministering moment, that brought back to me, long enough to catch it, the feeling of the medium in which, that June evening out of doors, I had had my first sight of Quint, and in which, too, at those other instants, I had, after seeing him through the window, looked for him in vain in the circle of shrubbery. I recognized the signs, the portentsI recognized the moment, the spot. But they remained unaccompanied and empty, and I continued unmolested; if unmolested one could call a young woman whose sensibility had, in the most extraordinary fashion, not declined but deepened. I had said in my talk with Mrs. Grose on that horrid scene of Floras by the lakeand had perplexed her by so sayingthat it would from that moment distress me much more to lose my power than to keep it. I had then expressed what was vividly in my mind the truth that, whether the children really saw or notsince, that is, it was not yet definitely provedI greatly preferred, as a safeguard, the fullness of my own exposure. I was ready to know the very worst that was to be known. What I had then had an ugly glimpse of was that my eyes might be sealed just while theirs were most opened. Well, my eyes were sealed, it appeared, at presenta consummation for which it seemed blasphemous not to thank God. There was, alas, a difficulty about that I would have thanked him with all my soul had I not had in a proportionate measure this conviction of the secret of my pupils. How can I retrace today the strange steps of my obsession? There were times of our being together when I would have been ready to swear that, literally, in my presence, but with my direct sense of it closed, they had visitors who were known and were welcome. Then it was that, had I not been deterred by the very chance that such an injury might prove greater than the injury to be averted, my exultation would have broken out. Theyre here, theyre here, you little wretches, I would have cried, and you cant deny it now! The little wretches denied it with all the added volume of their sociability and their tenderness, in just the crystal depths of whichlike the flash of a fish in a streamthe mockery of their advantage peeped up. The shock, in truth, had sunk into me still deeper than I knew on the night when, looking out to see either Quint or Miss Jessel under the stars, I had beheld the boy over whose rest I watched and who had immediately brought in with himhad straightway, there, turned it on methe lovely upward look with which, from the battlements above me, the hideous apparition of Quint had played. If it was a question of a scare, my discovery on this occasion had scared me more than any other, and it was in the condition of nerves produced by it that I made my actual inductions. They harassed me so that sometimes, at odd moments, I shut myself up audibly to rehearseit was at once a fantastic relief and a renewed despairthe manner in which I might come to the point. I approached it from one side and the other while, in my room, I flung myself about, but I always broke down in the monstrous utterance of names. As they died away on my lips, I said to myself that I should indeed help them to represent something infamous, if, by pronouncing them, I should violate as rare a little case of instinctive delicacy as any schoolroom, probably, had ever known. When I said to myself They have the manners to be silent, and you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak! I felt myself crimson and I covered my face with my hands. After these secret scenes I chattered more than ever, going on volubly enough till one of our prodigious, palpable hushes occurredI can call them nothing elsethe strange, dizzy lift or swim (I try for terms!) into a stillness, a pause of all life, that had nothing to do with the more or less noise that at the moment we might be engaged in making and that I could hear through any deepened exhilaration or quickened recitation or louder strum of the piano. Then it was that the others, the outsiders, were there. Though they were not angels, they passed, as the French say, causing me, while they stayed, to tremble with the fear of their addressing to their younger victims some yet more infernal message or more vivid image than they had thought good enough for myself. What it was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that, whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw morethings terrible and unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in the past. Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time, a chill which we vociferously denied that we felt; and we had, all three, with repetition, got into such splendid training that we went, each time, almost automatically, to mark the close of the incident, through the very same movements. It was striking of the children, at all events, to kiss me inveterately with a kind of wild irrelevance and never to failone or the otherof the precious question that had helped us through many a peril. When do you think he will come? Dont you think we ought to write?there was nothing like that inquiry, we found by experience, for carrying off an awkwardness. He of course was their uncle in Harley Street; and we lived in much profusion of theory that he might at any moment arrive to mingle in our circle. It was impossible to have given less encouragement than he had done to such a doctrine, but if we had not had the doctrine to fall back upon we should have deprived each other of some of our finest exhibitions. He never wrote to themthat may have been selfish, but it was a part of the flattery of his trust of me; for the way in which a man pays his highest tribute to a woman is apt to be but by the more festal celebration of one of the sacred laws of his comfort; and I held that I carried out the spirit of the pledge given not to appeal to him when I let my charges understand that their own letters were but charming literary exercises. They were too beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself; I have them all to this hour. This was a rule indeed which only added to the satiric effect of my being plied with the supposition that he might at any moment be among us. It was exactly as if my charges knew how almost more awkward than anything else that might be for me. There appears to me, moreover, as I look back, no note in all this more extraordinary than the mere fact that, in spite of my tension and of their triumph, I never lost patience with them. Adorable they must in truth have been, I now reflect, that I didnt in these days hate them! Would exasperation, however, if relief had longer been postponed, finally have betrayed me? It little matters, for relief arrived. I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush. XIV Walking to church a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at my side and his sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Groses, well in sight. It was a crisp, clear day, the first of its order for some time; the night had brought a touch of frost, and the autumn air, bright and sharp, made the church bells almost gay. It was an odd accident of thought that I should have happened at such a moment to be particularly and very gratefully struck with the obedience of my little charges. Why did they never resent my inexorable, my perpetual society? Something or other had brought nearer home to me that I had all but pinned the boy to my shawl and that, in the way our companions were marshaled before me, I might have appeared to provide against some danger of rebellion. I was like a gaoler with an eye to possible surprises and escapes. But all this belongedI mean their magnificent little surrenderjust to the special array of the facts that were most abysmal. Turned out for Sunday by his uncles tailor, who had had a free hand and a notion of pretty waistcoats and of his grand little air, Miless whole title to independence, the rights of his sex and situation, were so stamped upon him that if he had suddenly struck for freedom I should have had nothing to say. I was by the strangest of chances wondering how I should meet him when the revolution unmistakably occurred. I call it a revolution because I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama, and the catastrophe was precipitated. Look here, my dear, you know, he charmingly said, when in the world, please, am I going back to school? Transcribed here the speech sounds harmless enough, particularly as uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all interlocutors, but above all at his eternal governess, he threw off intonations as if he were tossing roses. There was something in them that always made one catch, and I caught, at any rate, now so effectually that I stopped as short as if one of the trees of the park had fallen across the road. There was something new, on the spot, between us, and he was perfectly aware that I recognized it, though, to enable me to do so, he had no need to look a whit less candid and charming than usual. I could feel in him how he already, from my at first finding nothing to reply, perceived the advantage he had gained. I was so slow to find anything that he had plenty of time, after a minute, to continue with his suggestive but inconclusive smile You know, my dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady always! His my dear was constantly on his lips for me, and nothing could have expressed more the exact shade of the sentiment with which I desired to inspire my pupils than its fond familiarity. It was so respectfully easy. But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! I remember that, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see in the beautiful face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I looked. And always with the same lady? I returned. He neither blanched nor winked. The whole thing was virtually out between us. Ah, of course, shes a jolly, perfect lady; but, after all, Im a fellow, dont you see? thatswell, getting on. I lingered there with him an instant ever so kindly. Yes, youre getting on. Oh, but I felt helpless! I have kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed to know that and to play with it. And you cant say Ive not been awfully good, can you? I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it would have been to walk on, I was not yet quite able. No, I cant say that, Miles. Except just that one night, you know! That one night? I couldnt look as straight as he. Why, when I went downwent out of the house. Oh, yes. But I forget what you did it for. You forget?he spoke with the sweet extravagance of childish reproach. Why, it was to show you I could! Oh, yes, you could. And I can again. I felt that I might, perhaps, after all, succeed in keeping my wits about me. Certainly. But you wont. No, not that again. It was nothing. It was nothing, I said. But we must go on. He resumed our walk with me, passing his hand into my arm. Then when am I going back? I wore, in turning it over, my most responsible air. Were you very happy at school? He just considered.


Oh, Im happy enough anywhere! Well, then, I quavered, if youre just as happy here! Ah, but that isnt everything! Of course you know a lot But you hint that you know almost as much? I risked as he paused. Not half I want to! Miles honestly professed. But it isnt so much that. What is it, then? WellI want to see more life. I see; I see. We had arrived within sight of the church and of various persons, including several of the household of Bly, on their way to it and clustered about the door to see us go in. I quickened our step; I wanted to get there before the question between us opened up much further; I reflected hungrily that, for more than an hour, he would have to be silent; and I thought with envy of the comparative dusk of the pew and of the almost spiritual help of the hassock on which I might bend my knees. I seemed literally to be running a race with some confusion to which he was about to reduce me, but I felt that he had got in first when, before we had even entered the churchyard, he threw out I want my own sort! It literally made me bound forward. There are not many of your own sort, Miles! I laughed. Unless perhaps dear little Flora! You really compare me to a baby girl? This found me singularly weak. Dont you, then, love our sweet Flora? If I didntand you, too; if I didnt! he repeated as if retreating for a jump, yet leaving his thought so unfinished that, after we had come into the gate, another stop, which he imposed on me by the pressure of his arm, had become inevitable. Mrs. Grose and Flora had passed into the church, the other worshippers had followed, and we were, for the minute, alone among the old, thick graves. We had paused, on the path from the gate, by a low, oblong, tablelike tomb. Yes, if you didnt? He looked, while I waited, at the graves. Well, you know what! But he didnt move, and he presently produced something that made me drop straight down on the stone slab, as if suddenly to rest. Does my uncle think what you think? I markedly rested. How do you know what I think? Ah, well, of course I dont; for it strikes me you never tell me. But I mean does he know? Know what, Miles? Why, the way Im going on. I perceived quickly enough that I could make, to this inquiry, no answer that would not involve something of a sacrifice of my employer. Yet it appeared to me that we were all, at Bly, sufficiently sacrificed to make that venial. I dont think your uncle much cares. Miles, on this, stood looking at me. Then dont you think he can be made to? In what way? Why, by his coming down. But wholl get him to come down? I will! the boy said with extraordinary brightness and emphasis. He gave me another look charged with that expression and then marched off alone into church. XV The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed him. It was a pitiful surrender to agitation, but my being aware of this had somehow no power to restore me. I only sat there on my tomb and read into what my little friend had said to me the fullness of its meaning; by the time I had grasped the whole of which I had also embraced, for absence, the pretext that I was ashamed to offer my pupils and the rest of the congregation such an example of delay. What I said to myself above all was that Miles had got something out of me and that the proof of it, for him, would be just this awkward collapse. He had got out of me that there was something I was much afraid of and that he should probably be able to make use of my fear to gain, for his own purpose, more freedom. My fear was of having to deal with the intolerable question of the grounds of his dismissal from school, for that was really but the question of the horrors gathered behind. That his uncle should arrive to treat with me of these things was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired to bring on; but I could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it that I simply procrastinated and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to my deep discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to say to me Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this interruption of my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you a life thats so unnatural for a boy. What was so unnatural for the particular boy I was concerned with was this sudden revelation of a consciousness and a plan. That was what really overcame me, what prevented my going in. I walked round the church, hesitating, hovering; I reflected that I had already, with him, hurt myself beyond repair. Therefore I could patch up nothing, and it was too extreme an effort to squeeze beside him into the pew he would be so much more sure than ever to pass his arm into mine and make me sit there for an hour in close, silent contact with his commentary on our talk. For the first minute since his arrival I wanted to get away from him. As I paused beneath the high east window and listened to the sounds of worship, I was taken with an impulse that might master me, I felt, completely should I give it the least encouragement. I might easily put an end to my predicament by getting away altogether. Here was my chance; there was no one to stop me; I could give the whole thing upturn my back and retreat. It was only a question of hurrying again, for a few preparations, to the house which the attendance at church of so many of the servants would practically have left unoccupied. No one, in short, could blame me if I should just drive desperately off. What was it to get away if I got away only till dinner? That would be in a couple of hours, at the end of whichI had the acute previsionmy little pupils would play at innocent wonder about my nonappearance in their train. What did you do, you naughty, bad thing? Why in the world, to worry us soand take our thoughts off, too, dont you know?did you desert us at the very door? I couldnt meet such questions nor, as they asked them, their false little lovely eyes; yet it was all so exactly what I should have to meet that, as the prospect grew sharp to me, I at last let myself go. I got, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away; I came straight out of the churchyard and, thinking hard, retraced my steps through the park. It seemed to me that by the time I reached the house I had made up my mind I would fly. The Sunday stillness both of the approaches and of the interior, in which I met no one, fairly excited me with a sense of opportunity. Were I to get off quickly, this way, I should get off without a scene, without a word. My quickness would have to be remarkable, however, and the question of a conveyance was the great one to settle. Tormented, in the hall, with difficulties and obstacles, I remember sinking down at the foot of the staircasesuddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and then, with a revulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month before, in the darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things, I had seen the specter of the most horrible of women. At this I was able to straighten myself; I went the rest of the way up; I made, in my bewilderment, for the schoolroom, where there were objects belonging to me that I should have to take. But I opened the door to find again, in a flash, my eyes unsealed. In the presence of what I saw I reeled straight back upon my resistance. Seated at my own table in clear noonday light I saw a person whom, without my previous experience, I should have taken at the first blush for some housemaid who might have stayed at home to look after the place and who, availing herself of rare relief from observation and of the schoolroom table and my pens, ink, and paper, had applied herself to the considerable effort of a letter to her sweetheart. There was an effort in the way that, while her arms rested on the table, her hands with evident weariness supported her head; but at the moment I took this in I had already become aware that, in spite of my entrance, her attitude strangely persisted. Then it waswith the very act of its announcing itselfthat her identity flared up in a change of posture. She rose, not as if she had heard me, but with an indescribable grand melancholy of indifference and detachment, and, within a dozen feet of me, stood there as my vile predecessor. Dishonored and tragic, she was all before me; but even as I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image passed away. Dark as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and her unutterable woe, she had looked at me long enough to appear to say that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers. While these instants lasted, indeed, I had the extraordinary chill of feeling that it was I who was the intruder. It was as a wild protest against it that, actually addressing herYou terrible, miserable woman!I heard myself break into a sound that, by the open door, rang through the long passage and the empty house. She looked at me as if she heard me, but I had recovered myself and cleared the air. There was nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must stay. XVI I had so perfectly expected that the return of my pupils would be marked by a demonstration that I was freshly upset at having to take into account that they were dumb about my absence. Instead of gaily denouncing and caressing me, they made no allusion to my having failed them, and I was left, for the time, on perceiving that she too said nothing, to study Mrs. Groses odd face. I did this to such purpose that I made sure they had in some way bribed her to silence; a silence that, however, I would engage to break down on the first private opportunity. This opportunity came before tea I secured five minutes with her in the housekeepers room, where, in the twilight, amid a smell of lately baked bread, but with the place all swept and garnished, I found her sitting in pained placidity before the fire. So I see her still, so I see her best facing the flame from her straight chair in the dusky, shining room, a large clean image of the put awayof drawers closed and locked and rest without a remedy. Oh, yes, they asked me to say nothing; and to please themso long as they were thereof course I promised. But what had happened to you? I only went with you for the walk, I said. I had then to come back to meet a friend. She showed her surprise. A friendyou? Oh, yes, I have a couple! I laughed. But did the children give you a reason? For not alluding to your leaving us? Yes; they said you would like it better. Do you like it better? My face had made her rueful. No, I like it worse! But after an instant I added Did they say why I should like it better? No; Master Miles only said, We must do nothing but what she likes!  I wish indeed he would. And what did Flora say? Miss Flora was too sweet. She said, Oh, of course, of course!and I said the same. I thought a moment. You were too sweet, tooI can hear you all. But nonetheless, between Miles and me, its now all out. All out? My companion stared. But what, miss? Everything. It doesnt matter. Ive made up my mind. I came home, my dear, I went on, for a talk with Miss Jessel. I had by this time formed the habit of having Mrs. Grose literally well in hand in advance of my sounding that note; so that even now, as she bravely blinked under the signal of my word, I could keep her comparatively firm. A talk! Do you mean she spoke? It came to that. I found her, on my return, in the schoolroom. And what did she say? I can hear the good woman still, and the candor of her stupefaction. That she suffers the torments! It was this, of a truth, that made her, as she filled out my picture, gape. Do you mean, she faltered, of the lost? Of the lost. Of the damned. And thats why, to share them I faltered myself with the horror of it. But my companion, with less imagination, kept me up. To share them? She wants Flora. Mrs. Grose might, as I gave it to her, fairly have fallen away from me had I not been prepared. I still held her there, to show I was. As Ive told you, however, it doesnt matter. Because youve made up your mind? But to what? To everything. And what do you call everything? Why, sending for their uncle. Oh, miss, in pity do, my friend broke out. Ah, but I will, I will! I see its the only way. Whats out, as I told you, with Miles is that if he thinks Im afraid toand has ideas of what he gains by thathe shall see hes mistaken. Yes, yes; his uncle shall have it here from me on the spot (and before the boy himself, if necessary) that if Im to be reproached with having done nothing again about more school Yes, miss my companion pressed me. Well, theres that awful reason. There were now clearly so many of these for my poor colleague that she was excusable for being vague. Butawhich? Why, the letter from his old place. Youll show it to the master? I ought to have done so on the instant. Oh, no! said Mrs. Grose with decision. Ill put it before him, I went on inexorably, that I cant undertake to work the question on behalf of a child who has been expelled For weve never in the least known what! Mrs. Grose declared. For wickedness. For what elsewhen hes so clever and beautiful and perfect? Is he stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is he illnatured? Hes exquisiteso it can be only that; and that would open up the whole thing. After all, I said, its their uncles fault. If he left here such people! He didnt really in the least know them. The faults mine. She had turned quite pale. Well, you shant suffer, I answered. The children shant! she emphatically returned. I was silent awhile; we looked at each other. Then what am I to tell him? You neednt tell him anything. Ill tell him. I measured this. Do you mean youll write? Remembering she couldnt, I caught myself up. How do you communicate? I tell the bailiff. He writes. And should you like him to write our story? My question had a sarcastic force that I had not fully intended, and it made her, after a moment, inconsequently break down. The tears were again in her eyes. Ah, miss, you write! Welltonight, I at last answered; and on this we separated. XVII I went so far, in the evening, as to make a beginning. The weather had changed back, a great wind was abroad, and beneath the lamp, in my room, with Flora at peace beside me, I sat for a long time before a blank sheet of paper and listened to the lash of the rain and the batter of the gusts. Finally I went out, taking a candle; I crossed the passage and listened a minute at Miless door. What, under my endless obsession, I had been impelled to listen for was some betrayal of his not being at rest, and I presently caught one, but not in the form I had expected. His voice tinkled out. I say, you therecome in. It was a gaiety in the gloom! I went in with my light and found him, in bed, very wide awake, but very much at his ease. Well, what are you up to? he asked with a grace of sociability in which it occurred to me that Mrs. Grose, had she been present, might have looked in vain for proof that anything was out. I stood over him with my candle. How did you know I was there? Why, of course I heard you. Did you fancy you made no noise? Youre like a troop of cavalry! he beautifully laughed. Then you werent asleep? Not much! I lie awake and think. I had put my candle, designedly, a short way off, and then, as he held out his friendly old hand to me, had sat down on the edge of his bed. What is it, I asked, that you think of? What in the world, my dear, but you? Ah, the pride I take in your appreciation doesnt insist on that! I had so far rather you slept. Well, I think also, you know, of this queer business of ours. I marked the coolness of his firm little hand. Of what queer business, Miles? Why, the way you bring me up. And all the rest! I fairly held my breath a minute, and even from my glimmering taper there was light enough to show how he smiled up at me from his pillow. What do you mean by all the rest? Oh, you know, you know! I could say nothing for a minute, though I felt, as I held his hand and our eyes continued to meet, that my silence had all the air of admitting his charge and that nothing in the whole world of reality was perhaps at that moment so fabulous as our actual relation. Certainly you shall go back to school, I said, if it be that that troubles you. But not to the old placewe must find another, a better. How could I know it did trouble you, this question, when you never told me so, never spoke of it at all? His clear, listening face, framed in its smooth whiteness, made him for the minute as appealing as some wistful patient in a childrens hospital; and I would have given, as the resemblance came to me, all I possessed on earth really to be the nurse or the sister of charity who might have helped to cure him. Well, even as it was, I perhaps might help! Do you know youve never said a word to me about your schoolI mean the old one; never mentioned it in any way? He seemed to wonder; he smiled with the same loveliness. But he clearly gained time; he waited, he called for guidance. Havent I? It wasnt for me to help himit was for the thing I had met! Something in his tone and the expression of his face, as I got this from him, set my heart aching with such a pang as it had never yet known; so unutterably touching was it to see his little brain puzzled and his little resources taxed to play, under the spell laid on him, a part of innocence and consistency. No, neverfrom the hour you came back. Youve never mentioned to me one of your masters, one of your comrades, nor the least little thing that ever happened to you at school. Never, little Milesno, neverhave you given me an inkling of anything that may have happened there. Therefore you can fancy how much Im in the dark. Until you came out, that way, this morning, you had, since the first hour I saw you, scarce even made a reference to anything in your previous life. You seemed so perfectly to accept the present. It was extraordinary how my absolute conviction of his secret precocity (or whatever I might call the poison of an influence that I dared but half to phrase) made him, in spite of the faint breath of his inward trouble, appear as accessible as an older personimposed him almost as an intellectual equal. I thought you wanted to go on as you are. It struck me that at this he just faintly colored. He gave, at any rate, like a convalescent slightly fatigued, a languid shake of his head. I dontI dont. I want to get away. Youre tired of Bly? Oh, no, I like Bly. Well, then? Oh, you know what a boy wants! I felt that I didnt know so well as Miles, and I took temporary refuge. You want to go to your uncle? Again, at this, with his sweet ironic face, he made a movement on the pillow. Ah, you cant get off with that! I was silent a little, and it was I, now, I think, who changed color. My dear, I dont want to get off! You cant, even if you do. You cant, you cant!he lay beautifully staring. My uncle must come down, and you must completely settle things. If we do, I returned with some spirit, you may be sure it will be to take you quite away. Well, dont you understand that thats exactly what Im working for? Youll have to tell himabout the way youve let it all drop youll have to tell him a tremendous lot! The exultation with which he uttered this helped me somehow, for the instant, to meet him rather more. And how much will you, Miles, have to tell him? There are things hell ask you! He turned it over. Very likely. But what things? The things youve never told me. To make up his mind what to do with you. He cant send you back Oh, I dont want to go back! he broke in. I want a new field. He said it with admirable serenity, with positive unimpeachable gaiety; and doubtless it was that very note that most evoked for me the poignancy, the unnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappearance at the end of three months with all this bravado and still more dishonor. It overwhelmed me now that I should never be able to bear that, and it made me let myself go. I threw myself upon him and in the tenderness of my pity I embraced him. Dear little Miles, dear little Miles! My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, simply taking it with indulgent good humor. Well, old lady? Is there nothingnothing at all that you want to tell me? He turned off a little, facing round toward the wall and holding up his hand to look at as one had seen sick children look. Ive told youI told you this morning. Oh, I was sorry for him! That you just want me not to worry you? He looked round at me now, as if in recognition of my understanding him; then ever so gently, To let me alone, he replied. There was even a singular little dignity in it, something that made me release him, yet, when I had slowly risen, linger beside him. God knows I never wished to harass him, but I felt that merely, at this, to turn my back on him was to abandon or, to put it more truly, to lose him. Ive just begun a letter to your uncle, I said. Well, then, finish it! I waited a minute. What happened before? He gazed up at me again. Before what? Before you came back. And before you went away. For some time he was silent, but he continued to meet my eyes. What happened? It made me, the sound of the words, in which it seemed to me that I caught for the very first time a small faint quaver of consenting consciousnessit made me drop on my knees beside the bed and seize once more the chance of possessing him. Dear little Miles, dear little Miles, if you knew how I want to help you! Its only that, its nothing but that, and Id rather die than give you a pain or do you a wrongId rather die than hurt a hair of you. Dear little Milesoh, I brought it out now even if I should go too farI just want you to help me to save you! But I knew in a moment after this that I had gone too far. The answer to my appeal was instantaneous, but it came in the form of an extraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozen air, and a shake of the room as great as if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. The boy gave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of sound, might have seemed, indistinctly, though I was so close to him, a note either of jubilation or of terror. I jumped to my feet again and was conscious of darkness. So for a moment we remained, while I stared about me and saw that the drawn curtains were unstirred and the window tight. Why, the candles out! I then cried. It was I who blew it, dear! said Miles. XVIII The next day, after lessons, Mrs. Grose found a moment to say to me quietly Have you written, miss? YesIve written. But I didnt addfor the hourthat my letter, sealed and directed, was still in my pocket. There would be time enough to send it before the messenger should go to the village. Meanwhile there had been, on the part of my pupils, no more brilliant, more exemplary morning. It was exactly as if they had both had at heart to gloss over any recent little friction. They performed the dizziest feats of arithmetic, soaring quite out of my feeble range, and perpetrated, in higher spirits than ever, geographical and historical jokes. It was conspicuous of course in Miles in particular that he appeared to wish to show how easily he could let me down. This child, to my memory, really lives in a setting of beauty and misery that no words can translate; there was a distinction all his own in every impulse he revealed; never was a small natural creature, to the uninitiated eye all frankness and freedom, a more ingenious, a more extraordinary little gentleman. I had perpetually to guard against the wonder of contemplation into which my initiated view betrayed me; to check the irrelevant gaze and discouraged sigh in which I constantly both attacked and renounced the enigma of what such a little gentleman could have done that deserved a penalty. Say that, by the dark prodigy I knew, the imagination of all evil had been opened up to him all the justice within me ached for the proof that it could ever have flowered into an act. He had never, at any rate, been such a little gentleman as when, after our early dinner on this dreadful day, he came round to me and asked if I shouldnt like him, for half an hour, to play to me. David playing to Saul could never have shown a finer sense of the occasion. It was literally a charming exhibition of tact, of magnanimity, and quite tantamount to his saying outright The true knights we love to read about never push an advantage too far. I know what you mean now you mean thatto be let alone yourself and not followed upyoull cease to worry and spy upon me, wont keep me so close to you, will let me go and come. Well, I come, you seebut I dont go! Therell be plenty of time for that. I do really delight in your society, and I only want to show you that I contended for a principle. It may be imagined whether I resisted this appeal or failed to accompany him again, hand in hand, to the schoolroom. He sat down at the old piano and played as he had never played; and if there are those who think he had better have been kicking a football I can only say that I wholly agree with them. For at the end of a time that under his influence I had quite ceased to measure, I started up with a strange sense of having literally slept at my post. It was after luncheon, and by the schoolroom fire, and yet I hadnt really, in the least, slept I had only done something much worseI had forgotten. Where, all this time, was Flora? When I put the question to Miles, he played on a minute before answering and then could only say Why, my dear, how do I know?breaking moreover into a happy laugh which, immediately after, as if it were a vocal accompaniment, he prolonged into incoherent, extravagant song. I went straight to my room, but his sister was not there; then, before going downstairs, I looked into several others. As she was nowhere about she would surely be with Mrs. Grose, whom, in the comfort of that theory, I accordingly proceeded in quest of. I found her where I had found her the evening before, but she met my quick challenge with blank, scared ignorance. She had only supposed that, after the repast, I had carried off both the children; as to which she was quite in her right, for it was the very first time I had allowed the little girl out of my sight without some special provision. Of course now indeed she might be with the maids, so that the immediate thing was to look for her without an air of alarm. This we promptly arranged between us; but when, ten minutes later and in pursuance of our arrangement, we met in the hall, it was only to report on either side that after guarded inquiries we had altogether failed to trace her. For a minute there, apart from observation, we exchanged mute alarms, and I could feel with what high interest my friend returned me all those I had from the first given her. Shell be above, she presently saidin one of the rooms you havent searched. No; shes at a distance. I had made up my mind. She has gone out. Mrs. Grose stared. Without a hat? I naturally also looked volumes. Isnt that woman always without one? Shes with her? Shes with her! I declared. We must find them. My hand was on my friends arm, but she failed for the moment, confronted with such an account of the matter, to respond to my pressure. She communed, on the contrary, on the spot, with her uneasiness. And wheres Master Miles? Oh, hes with Quint. Theyre in the schoolroom. Lord, miss! My view, I was myself awareand therefore I suppose my tonehad never yet reached so calm an assurance. The tricks played, I went on; theyve successfully worked their plan. He found the most divine little way to keep me quiet while she went off.  Divine? Mrs. Grose bewilderedly echoed. Infernal, then! I almost cheerfully rejoined. He has provided for himself as well. But come! She had helplessly gloomed at the upper regions. You leave him? So long with Quint? YesI dont mind that now. She always ended, at these moments, by getting possession of my hand, and in this manner she could at present still stay me. But after gasping an instant at my sudden resignation, Because of your letter? she eagerly brought out. I quickly, by way of answer, felt for my letter, drew it forth, held it up, and then, freeing myself, went and laid it on the great hall table. Luke will take it, I said as I came back. I reached the house door and opened it; I was already on the steps. My companion still demurred the storm of the night and the early morning had dropped, but the afternoon was damp and gray. I came down to the drive while she stood in the doorway. You go with nothing on? What do I care when the child has nothing? I cant wait to dress, I cried, and if you must do so, I leave you. Try meanwhile, yourself, upstairs. With them? Oh, on this, the poor woman promptly joined me! XIX We went straight to the lake, as it was called at Bly, and I daresay rightly called, though I reflect that it may in fact have been a sheet of water less remarkable than it appeared to my untraveled eyes. My acquaintance with sheets of water was small, and the pool of Bly, at all events on the few occasions of my consenting, under the protection of my pupils, to affront its surface in the old flatbottomed boat moored there for our use, had impressed me both with its extent and its agitation. The usual place of embarkation was half a mile from the house, but I had an intimate conviction that, wherever Flora might be, she was not near home. She had not given me the slip for any small adventure, and, since the day of the very great one that I had shared with her by the pond, I had been aware, in our walks, of the quarter to which she most inclined. This was why I had now given to Mrs. Groses steps so marked a directiona direction that made her, when she perceived it, oppose a resistance that showed me she was freshly mystified. Youre going to the water, Miss?you think shes in? She may be, though the depth is, I believe, nowhere very great. But what I judge most likely is that shes on the spot from which, the other day, we saw together what I told you. When she pretended not to see? With that astounding selfpossession? Ive always been sure she wanted to go back alone. And now her brother has managed it for her. Mrs. Grose still stood where she had stopped. You suppose they really talk of them? I could meet this with a confidence! They say things that, if we heard them, would simply appall us. And if she is there Yes? Then Miss Jessel is? Beyond a doubt. You shall see. Oh, thank you! my friend cried, planted so firm that, taking it in, I went straight on without her. By the time I reached the pool, however, she was close behind me, and I knew that, whatever, to her apprehension, might befall me, the exposure of my society struck her as her least danger. She exhaled a moan of relief as we at last came in sight of the greater part of the water without a sight of the child. There was no trace of Flora on that nearer side of the bank where my observation of her had been most startling, and none on the opposite edge, where, save for a margin of some twenty yards, a thick copse came down to the water. The pond, oblong in shape, had a width so scant compared to its length that, with its ends out of view, it might have been taken for a scant river. We looked at the empty expanse, and then I felt the suggestion of my friends eyes. I knew what she meant and I replied with a negative headshake. No, no; wait! She has taken the boat. My companion stared at the vacant mooring place and then again across the lake. Then where is it? Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs. She has used it to go over, and then has managed to hide it. All alonethat child? Shes not alone, and at such times shes not a child shes an old, old woman. I scanned all the visible shore while Mrs.