“Little Flora? Not so bad but that she’ll presently be better. London
will set her up. Bly had ceased to agree with her. Come here and take
your mutton.”

He alertly obeyed me, carried the plate carefully to his seat, and,
when he was established, went on. “Did Bly disagree with her so
terribly suddenly?”

“Not so suddenly as you might think. One had seen it coming on.”

“Then why didn’t you get her off before?”

I found myself prompt. “She’s _not_ too ill to travel: she only might
have become so if she had stayed. This was just the moment to seize.
The journey will dissipate the influence”—oh, I was grand!—“and carry
it off.”

“I see, I see”—Miles, for that matter, was grand, too. He settled to
his repast with the charming little “table manner” that, from the day
of his arrival, had relieved me of all grossness of admonition.
Whatever he had been driven from school for, it was not for ugly
feeding. He was irreproachable, as always, today; but he was
unmistakably more conscious. He was discernibly trying to take for
granted more things than he found, without assistance, quite easy; and
he dropped into peaceful silence while he felt his situation. Our meal
was of the briefest—mine a vain pretense, and I had the things
immediately removed. While this was done Miles stood again with his
hands in his little pockets and his back to me—stood and looked out of
the wide window through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled
me up. We continued silent while the maid was with us—as silent, it
whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding
journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter. He turned
round only when the waiter had left us. “Well—so we’re alone!”

“Oh, more or less.” I fancy my smile was pale. “Not absolutely. We
shouldn’t like that!” I went on.

“No—I suppose we shouldn’t. Of course we have the others.”

“We have the others—we have indeed the others,” I concurred.

“Yet even though we have them,” he returned, still with his hands in
his pockets and planted there in front of me, “they don’t much count,
do they?”

I made the best of it, but I felt wan. “It depends on what you call
‘much’!”

“Yes”—with all accommodation—“everything depends!” On this, however, he
faced to the window again and presently reached it with his vague,
restless, cogitating step. He remained there awhile, with his forehead
against the glass, in contemplation of the stupid shrubs I knew and the
dull things of November. I had always my hypocrisy of “work,” behind
which, now, I gained the sofa. Steadying myself with it there as I had
repeatedly done at those moments of torment that I have described as
the moments of my knowing the children to be given to something from
which I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of being prepared
for the worst. But an extraordinary impression dropped on me as I
extracted a meaning from the boy’s embarrassed back—none other than the
impression that I was not barred now. This inference grew in a few
minutes to sharp intensity and seemed bound up with the direct
perception that it was positively _he_ who was. The frames and squares
of the great window were a kind of image, for him, of a kind of
failure. I felt that I saw him, at any rate, shut in or shut out. He
was admirable, but not comfortable: I took it in with a throb of hope.
Wasn’t he looking, through the haunted pane, for something he couldn’t
see?—and wasn’t it the first time in the whole business that he had
known such a lapse? The first, the very first: I found it a splendid
portent. It made him anxious, though he watched himself; he had been
anxious all day and, even while in his usual sweet little manner he sat
at table, had needed all his small strange genius to give it a gloss.
When he at last turned round to meet me, it was almost as if this
genius had succumbed. “Well, I think I’m glad Bly agrees with _me!_”

“You would certainly seem to have seen, these twenty-four hours, a good
deal more of it than for some time before. I hope,” I went on bravely,
“that you’ve been enjoying yourself.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve been ever so far; all round about—miles and miles away.
I’ve never been so free.”

He had really a manner of his own, and I could only try to keep up with
him. “Well, do you like it?”

He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words—“Do
_you?_”—more discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain.
Before I had time to deal with that, however, he continued as if with
the sense that this was an impertinence to be softened. “Nothing could
be more charming than the way you take it, for of course if we’re alone
together now it’s you that are alone most. But I hope,” he threw in,
“you don’t particularly mind!”

“Having to do with you?” I asked. “My dear child, how can I help
minding? Though I’ve renounced all claim to your company—you’re so
beyond me—I at least greatly enjoy it. What else should I stay on for?”

He looked at me more directly, and the expression of his face, graver
now, struck me as the most beautiful I had ever found in it. “You stay
on just for _that?_”

“Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest I
take in you till something can be done for you that may be more worth
your while. That needn’t surprise you.” My voice trembled so that I
felt it impossible to suppress the shake. “Don’t you remember how I
told you, when I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that
there was nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for you?”

“Yes, yes!” He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had a tone
to master; but he was so much more successful than I that, laughing out
through his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly jesting. “Only
that, I think, was to get me to do something for _you!_”

“It was partly to get you to do something,” I conceded. “But, you know,
you didn’t do it.”

“Oh, yes,” he said with the brightest superficial eagerness, “you
wanted me to tell you something.”

“That’s it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you know.”

“Ah, then, is _that_ what you’ve stayed over for?”

He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest
little quiver of resentful passion; but I can’t begin to express the
effect upon me of an implication of surrender even so faint. It was as
if what I had yearned for had come at last only to astonish me. “Well,
yes—I may as well make a clean breast of it, it was precisely for
that.”

He waited so long that I supposed it for the purpose of repudiating the
assumption on which my action had been founded; but what he finally
said was: “Do you mean now—here?”

“There couldn’t be a better place or time.” He looked round him
uneasily, and I had the rare—oh, the queer!—impression of the very
first symptom I had seen in him of the approach of immediate fear. It
was as if he were suddenly afraid of me—which struck me indeed as
perhaps the best thing to make him. Yet in the very pang of the effort
I felt it vain to try sternness, and I heard myself the next instant so
gentle as to be almost grotesque. “You want so to go out again?”

“Awfully!” He smiled at me heroically, and the touching little bravery
of it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He had picked up
his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that
gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of
what I was doing. To do it in _any_ way was an act of violence, for
what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and
guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of
the possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn’t it base to create
for a being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read
into our situation a clearness it couldn’t have had at the time, for I
seem to see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a
prevision of the anguish that was to come. So we circled about, with
terrors and scruples, like fighters not daring to close. But it was for
each other we feared! That kept us a little longer suspended and
unbruised. “I’ll tell you everything,” Miles said—“I mean I’ll tell you
anything you like. You’ll stay on with me, and we shall both be all
right, and I _will_ tell you—I _will_. But not now.”

My insistence turned him from me and kept him once more at his window
in a silence during which, between us, you might have heard a pin drop.
Then he was before me again with the air of a person for whom, outside,
someone who had frankly to be reckoned with was waiting. “I have to see
Luke.”

I had not yet reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and I felt
proportionately ashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies made up my
truth. I achieved thoughtfully a few loops of my knitting. “Well, then,
go to Luke, and I’ll wait for what you promise. Only, in return for
that, satisfy, before you leave me, one very much smaller request.”

He looked as if he felt he had succeeded enough to be able still a
little to bargain. “Very much smaller—?”

“Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me”—oh, my work preoccupied
me, and I was offhand!—“if, yesterday afternoon, from the table in the
hall, you took, you know, my letter.”

My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from something
that I can describe only as a fierce split of my attention—a stroke
that at first, as I sprang straight up, reduced me to the mere blind
movement of getting hold of him, drawing him close, and, while I just
fell for support against the nearest piece of furniture, instinctively
keeping him with his back to the window. The appearance was full upon
us that I had already had to deal with here: Peter Quint had come into
view like a sentinel before a prison. The next thing I saw was that,
from outside, he had reached the window, and then I knew that, close to
the glass and glaring in through it, he offered once more to the room
his white face of damnation. It represents but grossly what took place
within me at the sight to say that on the second my decision was made;
yet I believe that no woman so overwhelmed ever in so short a time
recovered her grasp of the _act_. It came to me in the very horror of
the immediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I
saw and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration—I can
call it by no other name—was that I felt how voluntarily, how
transcendently, I _might_. It was like fighting with a demon for a
human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human
soul—held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm’s length—had a perfect
dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead. The face that was close to
mine was as white as the face against the glass, and out of it
presently came a sound, not low nor weak, but as if from much further
away, that I drank like a waft of fragrance.

At this, with a moan of joy, I enfolded, I drew him close; and while I
held him to my breast, where I could feel in the sudden fever of his
little body the tremendous pulse of his little heart, I kept my eyes on
the thing at the window and saw it move and shift its posture. I have
likened it to a sentinel, but its slow wheel, for a moment, was rather
the prowl of a baffled beast. My present quickened courage, however,
was such that, not too much to let it through, I had to shade, as it
were, my flame. Meanwhile the glare of the face was again at the
window, the scoundrel fixed as if to watch and wait. It was the very
confidence that I might now defy him, as well as the positive
certitude, by this time, of the child’s unconsciousness, that made me
go on. “What did you take it for?”

My eyes were now, as I held him off a little again, on Miles’s own
face, in which the collapse of mockery showed me how complete was the
ravage of uneasiness. What was prodigious was that at last, by my
success, his sense was sealed and his communication stopped: he knew
that he was in presence, but knew not of what, and knew still less that
I also was and that I did know. And what did this strain of trouble
matter when my eyes went back to the window only to see that the air
was clear again and—by my personal triumph—the influence quenched?
There was nothing there. I felt that the cause was mine and that I
should surely get _all_. “And you found nothing!”—I let my elation out.

He gave the most mournful, thoughtful little headshake. “Nothing.”

“Nothing, nothing!” I almost shouted in my joy.

I kissed his forehead; it was drenched. “So what have you done with
it?”

“Burned it?” It was now or never. “Is that what you did at school?”

“Other things?” He appeared now to be thinking of something far off and
that reached him only through the pressure of his anxiety. Yet it did
reach him. “Did I _steal?_”

I felt myself redden to the roots of my hair as well as wonder if it
were more strange to put to a gentleman such a question or to see him
take it with allowances that gave the very distance of his fall in the
world. “Was it for that you mightn’t go back?”

The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little surprise. “Did you
know I mightn’t go back?”

He gave me at this the longest and strangest look. “Everything?”

“Everything. Therefore _did_ you—?” But I couldn’t say it again.

Miles could, very simply. “No. I didn’t steal.”

My face must have shown him I believed him utterly; yet my hands—but it
was for pure tenderness—shook him as if to ask him why, if it was all
for nothing, he had condemned me to months of torment. “What then did
you do?”

He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew his
breath, two or three times over, as if with difficulty. He might have
been standing at the bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some
faint green twilight. “Well—I said things.”

Never, truly, had a person “turned out” shown so little to explain it
as this little person! He appeared to weigh my question, but in a
manner quite detached and almost helpless. “Well, I suppose I
oughtn’t.”

He evidently tried to remember, but it dropped—he had lost it. “I don’t
know!”

He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his surrender, which was
indeed practically, by this time, so complete that I ought to have left
it there. But I was infatuated—I was blind with victory, though even
then the very effect that was to have brought him so much nearer was
already that of added separation. “Was it to everyone?” I asked.

“No; it was only to—” But he gave a sick little headshake. “I don’t
remember their names.”

Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker
obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity
the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the
instant confounding and bottomless, for if he _were_ innocent, what
then on earth was _I?_ Paralyzed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of
the question, I let him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh,
he turned away from me again; which, as he faced toward the clear
window, I suffered, feeling that I had nothing now there to keep him
from. “And did they repeat what you said?” I went on after a moment.

He was soon at some distance from me, still breathing hard and again
with the air, though now without anger for it, of being confined
against his will. Once more, as he had done before, he looked up at the
dim day as if, of what had hitherto sustained him, nothing was left but
an unspeakable anxiety. “Oh, yes,” he nevertheless replied—“they must
have repeated them. To those _they_ liked,” he added.

There was, somehow, less of it than I had expected; but I turned it
over. “And these things came round—?”

“To the masters? Oh, yes!” he answered very simply. “But I didn’t know
they’d tell.”

“The masters? They didn’t—they’ve never told. That’s why I ask you.”

He turned to me again his little beautiful fevered face. “Yes, it was
too bad.”

“What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home.”

I can’t name the exquisite pathos of the contradiction given to such a
speech by such a speaker; I only know that the next instant I heard
myself throw off with homely force: “Stuff and nonsense!” But the next
after that I must have sounded stern enough. “What _were_ these
things?”