“Oh, yes, they asked me to say nothing; and to please them—so long as
they were there—of 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 friend—_you?_”

“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, too—I can hear you all. But
nonetheless, between Miles and me, it’s now all out.”

“All out?” My companion stared. “But what, miss?”

“Everything. It doesn’t matter. I’ve 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.

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 that’s 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 I’ve told you, however, it doesn’t matter.”

“Because you’ve made up your mind? But to what?”

“Oh, miss, in pity do,” my friend broke out. “ah, but I will, I _will!_
I see it’s the only way. What’s ‘out,’ as I told you, with Miles is
that if he thinks I’m afraid to—and has ideas of what he gains by
that—he shall see he’s mistaken. Yes, yes; his uncle shall have it here
from me on the spot (and before the boy himself, if necessary) that if
I’m to be reproached with having done nothing again about more school—”

There were now clearly so many of these for my poor colleague that she
was excusable for being vague. “But—a—which?”

“I ought to have done so on the instant.”

“I’ll put it before him,” I went on inexorably, “that I can’t undertake
to work the question on behalf of a child who has been expelled—”

“For we’ve never in the least known what!” Mrs. Grose declared.

“For wickedness. For what else—when he’s so clever and beautiful and
perfect? Is he stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is he ill-natured?
He’s exquisite—so it can be only _that_; and that would open up the
whole thing. After all,” I said, “it’s their uncle’s fault. If he left
here such people—!”

“He didn’t really in the least know them. The fault’s mine.” She had
turned quite pale.

“The children shan’t!” she emphatically returned.

I was silent awhile; we looked at each other. “Then what am I to tell
him?”

“You needn’t tell him anything. _I’ll_ tell him.”

I measured this. “Do you mean you’ll write—?” Remembering she couldn’t,
I caught myself up. “How do you communicate?”

“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!”

“Well—tonight,” I at last answered; and on this we separated.

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 Miles’s 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 there—come 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? You’re
like a troop of cavalry!” he beautifully laughed.

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?”

“Ah, the pride I take in your appreciation doesn’t 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?”

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 place—we 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 children’s 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 you’ve never said a word
to me about your school—I 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. “Haven’t I?” It wasn’t
for _me_ to help him—it 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, never—from the hour you came
back. You’ve 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 Miles—no, never—have you given me an inkling of
anything that _may_ have happened there. Therefore you can fancy how
much I’m 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 person—imposed 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 don’t—I don’t. I want to get away.”

I felt that I didn’t 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 can’t get off with that!”

I was silent a little, and it was I, now, I think, who changed color.
“My dear, I don’t want to get off!”

“You can’t, even if you do. You can’t, you can’t!”—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, don’t you understand that that’s exactly what I’m working for?
You’ll have to tell him—about the way you’ve let it all drop: you’ll
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 he’ll ask you!”

He turned it over. “Very likely. But what things?”

“The things you’ve never told me. To make up his mind what to do with
you. He can’t send you back—”

“Oh, I don’t 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 nothing—nothing 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. “I’ve told you—I
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.
“I’ve just begun a letter to your uncle,” I said.

I waited a minute. “What happened before?”

“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
consciousness—it 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! It’s only that, it’s
nothing but that, and I’d rather die than give you a pain or do you a
wrong—I’d rather die than hurt a hair of you. Dear little Miles”—oh, I
brought it out now even if I _should_ go too far—“I 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 candle’s out!” I then cried.

“It was I who blew it, dear!” said Miles.

The next day, after lessons, Mrs. Grose found a moment to say to me
quietly: “Have you written, miss?”

“Yes—I’ve written.” But I didn’t add—for the hour—that 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 shouldn’t 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 that—to be let alone yourself and not followed up—you’ll cease to
worry and spy upon me, won’t keep me so close to you, will let me go
and come. Well, I ‘come,’ you see—but I don’t go! There’ll 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
hadn’t really, in the least, slept: I had only done something much
worse—I 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.