She promptly understood me. “You mean the cruel charge—?”

“It doesn’t live an instant. My dear woman, _look_ at him!”

She smiled at my pretention to have discovered his charm. “I assure
you, miss, I do nothing else! What will you say, then?” she immediately
added.

“In answer to the letter?” I had made up my mind. “Nothing.”

She gave with her apron a great wipe to her mouth. “Then I’ll stand by
you. We’ll see it out.”

“We’ll see it out!” I ardently echoed, giving her my hand to make it a
vow.

She held me there a moment, then whisked up her apron again with her
detached hand. “Would you mind, miss, if I used the freedom—”

“To kiss me? No!” I took the good creature in my arms and, after we had
embraced like sisters, felt still more fortified and indignant.

This, at all events, was for the time: a time so full that, as I recall
the way it went, it reminds me of all the art I now need to make it a
little distinct. What I look back at with amazement is the situation I
accepted. I had undertaken, with my companion, to see it out, and I was
under a charm, apparently, that could smooth away the extent and the
far and difficult connections of such an effort. I was lifted aloft on
a great wave of infatuation and pity. I found it simple, in my
ignorance, my confusion, and perhaps my conceit, to assume that I could
deal with a boy whose education for the world was all on the point of
beginning. I am unable even to remember at this day what proposal I
framed for the end of his holidays and the resumption of his studies.
Lessons with me, indeed, that charming summer, we all had a theory that
he was to have; but I now feel that, for weeks, the lessons must have
been rather my own. I learned something—at first, certainly—that had
not been one of the teachings of my small, smothered life; learned to
be amused, and even amusing, and not to think for the morrow. It was
the first time, in a manner, that I had known space and air and
freedom, all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature. And
then there was consideration—and consideration was sweet. Oh, it was a
trap—not designed, but deep—to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps
to my vanity; to whatever, in me, was most excitable. The best way to
picture it all is to say that I was off my guard. They gave me so
little trouble—they were of a gentleness so extraordinary. I used to
speculate—but even this with a dim disconnectedness—as to how the rough
future (for all futures are rough!) would handle them and might bruise
them. They had the bloom of health and happiness; and yet, as if I had
been in charge of a pair of little grandees, of princes of the blood,
for whom everything, to be right, would have to be enclosed and
protected, the only form that, in my fancy, the afteryears could take
for them was that of a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden
and the park. It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke
into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness—that hush in
which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the
spring of a beast.

In the first weeks the days were long; they often, at their finest,
gave me what I used to call my own hour, the hour when, for my pupils,
teatime and bedtime having come and gone, I had, before my final
retirement, a small interval alone. Much as I liked my companions, this
hour was the thing in the day I liked most; and I liked it best of all
when, as the light faded—or rather, I should say, the day lingered and
the last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from the
old trees—I could take a turn into the grounds and enjoy, almost with a
sense of property that amused and flattered me, the beauty and dignity
of the place. It was a pleasure at these moments to feel myself
tranquil and justified; doubtless, perhaps, also to reflect that by my
discretion, my quiet good sense and general high propriety, I was
giving pleasure—if he ever thought of it!—to the person to whose
pressure I had responded. What I was doing was what he had earnestly
hoped and directly asked of me, and that I _could_, after all, do it
proved even a greater joy than I had expected. I daresay I fancied
myself, in short, a remarkable young woman and took comfort in the
faith that this would more publicly appear. Well, I needed to be
remarkable to offer a front to the remarkable things that presently
gave their first sign.

It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the
children were tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll. One of the
thoughts that, as I don’t in the least shrink now from noting, used to
be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a
charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at
the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I
didn’t ask more than that—I only asked that he should _know;_ and the
only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of
it, in his handsome face. That was exactly present to me—by which I
mean the face was—when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of
a long June day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the
plantations and coming into view of the house. What arrested me on the
spot—and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for—was
the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did
stand there!—but high up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the
tower to which, on that first morning, little Flora had conducted me.
This tower was one of a pair—square, incongruous, crenelated
structures—that were distinguished, for some reason, though I could see
little difference, as the new and the old. They flanked opposite ends
of the house and were probably architectural absurdities, redeemed in a
measure indeed by not being wholly disengaged nor of a height too
pretentious, dating, in their gingerbread antiquity, from a romantic
revival that was already a respectable past. I admired them, had
fancies about them, for we could all profit in a degree, especially
when they loomed through the dusk, by the grandeur of their actual
battlements; yet it was not at such an elevation that the figure I had
so often invoked seemed most in place.

It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two
distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first
and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of
the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person I
had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment of
vision of which, after these years, there is no living view that I can
hope to give. An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of
fear to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that faced me
was—a few more seconds assured me—as little anyone else I knew as it
was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it in Harley
Street—I had not seen it anywhere. The place, moreover, in the
strangest way in the world, had, on the instant, and by the very fact
of its appearance, become a solitude. To me at least, making my
statement here with a deliberation with which I have never made it, the
whole feeling of the moment returns. It was as if, while I took in—what
I did take in—all the rest of the scene had been stricken with death. I
can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of
evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the
friendly hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no
other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I saw with
a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the clearness in
the air, and the man who looked at me over the battlements was as
definite as a picture in a frame. That’s how I thought, with
extraordinary quickness, of each person that he might have been and
that he was not. We were confronted across our distance quite long
enough for me to ask myself with intensity who then he was and to feel,
as an effect of my inability to say, a wonder that in a few instants
more became intense.

The great question, or one of these, is, afterward, I know, with regard
to certain matters, the question of how long they have lasted. Well,
this matter of mine, think what you will of it, lasted while I caught
at a dozen possibilities, none of which made a difference for the
better, that I could see, in there having been in the house—and for how
long, above all?—a person of whom I was in ignorance. It lasted while I
just bridled a little with the sense that my office demanded that there
should be no such ignorance and no such person. It lasted while this
visitant, at all events—and there was a touch of the strange freedom,
as I remember, in the sign of familiarity of his wearing no hat—seemed
to fix me, from his position, with just the question, just the scrutiny
through the fading light, that his own presence provoked. We were too
far apart to call to each other, but there was a moment at which, at
shorter range, some challenge between us, breaking the hush, would have
been the right result of our straight mutual stare. He was in one of
the angles, the one away from the house, very erect, as it struck me,
and with both hands on the ledge. So I saw him as I see the letters I
form on this page; then, exactly, after a minute, as if to add to the
spectacle, he slowly changed his place—passed, looking at me hard all
the while, to the opposite corner of the platform. Yes, I had the
sharpest sense that during this transit he never took his eyes from me,
and I can see at this moment the way his hand, as he went, passed from
one of the crenelations to the next. He stopped at the other corner,
but less long, and even as he turned away still markedly fixed me. He
turned away; that was all I knew.

It was not that I didn’t wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was
rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a “secret” at Bly—a mystery
of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected
confinement? I can’t say how long I turned it over, or how long, in a
confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained where I had had my
collision; I only recall that when I re-entered the house darkness had
quite closed in. Agitation, in the interval, certainly had held me and
driven me, for I must, in circling about the place, have walked three
miles; but I was to be, later on, so much more overwhelmed that this
mere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill. The most singular
part of it, in fact—singular as the rest had been—was the part I
became, in the hall, aware of in meeting Mrs. Grose. This picture comes
back to me in the general train—the impression, as I received it on my
return, of the wide white panelled space, bright in the lamplight and
with its portraits and red carpet, and of the good surprised look of my
friend, which immediately told me she had missed me. It came to me
straightway, under her contact, that, with plain heartiness, mere
relieved anxiety at my appearance, she knew nothing whatever that could
bear upon the incident I had there ready for her. I had not suspected
in advance that her comfortable face would pull me up, and I somehow
measured the importance of what I had seen by my thus finding myself
hesitate to mention it. Scarce anything in the whole history seems to
me so odd as this fact that my real beginning of fear was one, as I may
say, with the instinct of sparing my companion. On the spot,
accordingly, in the pleasant hall and with her eyes on me, I, for a
reason that I couldn’t then have phrased, achieved an inward
resolution—offered a vague pretext for my lateness and, with the plea
of the beauty of the night and of the heavy dew and wet feet, went as
soon as possible to my room.

Here it was another affair; here, for many days after, it was a queer
affair enough. There were hours, from day to day—or at least there were
moments, snatched even from clear duties—when I had to shut myself up
to think. It was not so much yet that I was more nervous than I could
bear to be as that I was remarkably afraid of becoming so; for the
truth I had now to turn over was, simply and clearly, the truth that I
could arrive at no account whatever of the visitor with whom I had been
so inexplicably and yet, as it seemed to me, so intimately concerned.
It took little time to see that I could sound without forms of inquiry
and without exciting remark any domestic complications. The shock I had
suffered must have sharpened all my senses; I felt sure, at the end of
three days and as the result of mere closer attention, that I had not
been practiced upon by the servants nor made the object of any “game.”
Of whatever it was that I knew, nothing was known around me. There was
but one sane inference: someone had taken a liberty rather gross. That
was what, repeatedly, I dipped into my room and locked the door to say
to myself. We had been, collectively, subject to an intrusion; some
unscrupulous traveler, curious in old houses, had made his way in
unobserved, enjoyed the prospect from the best point of view, and then
stolen out as he came. If he had given me such a bold hard stare, that
was but a part of his indiscretion. The good thing, after all, was that
we should surely see no more of him.

This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge that
what, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my
charming work. My charming work was just my life with Miles and Flora,
and through nothing could I so like it as through feeling that I could
throw myself into it in trouble. The attraction of my small charges was
a constant joy, leading me to wonder afresh at the vanity of my
original fears, the distaste I had begun by entertaining for the
probable gray prose of my office. There was to be no gray prose, it
appeared, and no long grind; so how could work not be charming that
presented itself as daily beauty? It was all the romance of the nursery
and the poetry of the schoolroom. I don’t mean by this, of course, that
we studied only fiction and verse; I mean I can express no otherwise
the sort of interest my companions inspired. How can I describe that
except by saying that instead of growing used to them—and it’s a marvel
for a governess: I call the sisterhood to witness!—I made constant
fresh discoveries. There was one direction, assuredly, in which these
discoveries stopped: deep obscurity continued to cover the region of
the boy’s conduct at school. It had been promptly given me, I have
noted, to face that mystery without a pang. Perhaps even it would be
nearer the truth to say that—without a word—he himself had cleared it
up. He had made the whole charge absurd. My conclusion bloomed there
with the real rose flush of his innocence: he was only too fine and
fair for the little horrid, unclean school-world, and he had paid a
price for it. I reflected acutely that the sense of such differences,
such superiorities of quality, always, on the part of the
majority—which could include even stupid, sordid headmasters—turn
infallibly to the vindictive.

Both the children had a gentleness (it was their only fault, and it
never made Miles a muff) that kept them—how shall I express it?—almost
impersonal and certainly quite unpunishable. They were like the cherubs
of the anecdote, who had—morally, at any rate—nothing to whack! I
remember feeling with Miles in especial as if he had had, as it were,
no history. We expect of a small child a scant one, but there was in
this beautiful little boy something extraordinarily sensitive, yet
extraordinarily happy, that, more than in any creature of his age I
have seen, struck me as beginning anew each day. He had never for a
second suffered. I took this as a direct disproof of his having really
been chastised. If he had been wicked he would have “caught” it, and I
should have caught it by the rebound—I should have found the trace. I
found nothing at all, and he was therefore an angel. He never spoke of
his school, never mentioned a comrade or a master; and I, for my part,
was quite too much disgusted to allude to them. Of course I was under
the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I
perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to
any pain, and I had more pains than one. I was in receipt in these days
of disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well. But
with my children, what things in the world mattered? That was the
question I used to put to my scrappy retirements. I was dazzled by
their loveliness.