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 didn’t 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 not—I 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 cease—for the
time, at least—to 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 can’t express what followed
it save by saying that the silence itself—which was indeed in a manner
an attestation of my strength—became 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.

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 Flora’s 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 chair—feeling 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 was”—she 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 myself—well, you’ll 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 don’t like to frighten you!”

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 nine-times-nine. “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 didn’t 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 half-bowed 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 gentleman—they were all numbered
now—I 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 o’clock; 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 up—this 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 saw—as she
had not, I had satisfied myself, the previous time—was 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 sill—the casement opened
forward—and 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
brother’s 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 grounds—a 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 one—though high above the gardens—in 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 appeared—looking, that is, not so
much straight at me as at something that was apparently above me. There
was clearly another person above me—there 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 lawn—I felt
sick as I made it out—was poor little Miles himself.

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
provoking—on the part of the servants quite as much as on that of the
children—any 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 hadn’t I don’t know what would have become of me, for I couldn’t
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 Lord’s 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 that—as time went on without a public
accident—our 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
superiority—my accomplishments and my function—in her patience under my
pain. She offered her mind to my disclosures as, had I wished to mix a
witch’s 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 wondered—oh,
_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
couldn’t 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 match—I 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.