“She’ll be above,” she presently said—“in one of the rooms you haven’t
searched.”

“No; she’s at a distance.” I had made up my mind. “She has gone out.”

I naturally also looked volumes. “Isn’t that woman always without one?”

“She’s with _her!_” I declared. “We must find them.”

My hand was on my friend’s 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 where’s Master Miles?”

“Oh, _he’s_ with Quint. They’re in the schoolroom.”

“Lord, miss!” My view, I was myself aware—and therefore I suppose my
tone—had never yet reached so calm an assurance.

“The trick’s played,” I went on; “they’ve 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? Yes—I don’t 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 can’t 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!

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 flat-bottomed 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. Grose’s
steps so marked a direction—a direction that made her, when she
perceived it, oppose a resistance that showed me she was freshly
mystified. “You’re going to the water, Miss?—you think she’s _in_—?”

“She may be, though the depth is, I believe, nowhere very great. But
what I judge most likely is that she’s on the spot from which, the
other day, we saw together what I told you.”

“With that astounding self-possession? I’ve 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.”

“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 friend’s eyes. I knew what she meant and I
replied with a negative headshake.

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.”

“She’s not alone, and at such times she’s not a child: she’s an old,
old woman.” I scanned all the visible shore while Mrs. Grose took
again, into the queer element I offered her, one of her plunges of
submission; then I pointed out that the boat might perfectly be in a
small refuge formed by one of the recesses of the pool, an indentation
masked, for the hither side, by a projection of the bank and by a clump
of trees growing close to the water.

“But if the boat’s there, where on earth’s _she?_” my colleague
anxiously asked.

“That’s exactly what we must learn.” And I started to walk further.

“Certainly, far as it is. It will take us but ten minutes, but it’s far
enough to have made the child prefer not to walk. She went straight
over.”

“Laws!” cried my friend again; the chain of my logic was ever too much
for her. It dragged her at my heels even now, and when we had got
halfway round—a devious, tiresome process, on ground much broken and by
a path choked with overgrowth—I paused to give her breath. I sustained
her with a grateful arm, assuring her that she might hugely help me;
and this started us afresh, so that in the course of but few minutes
more we reached a point from which we found the boat to be where I had
supposed it. It had been intentionally left as much as possible out of
sight and was tied to one of the stakes of a fence that came, just
there, down to the brink and that had been an assistance to
disembarking. I recognized, as I looked at the pair of short, thick
oars, quite safely drawn up, the prodigious character of the feat for a
little girl; but I had lived, by this time, too long among wonders and
had panted to too many livelier measures. There was a gate in the
fence, through which we passed, and that brought us, after a trifling
interval, more into the open. Then, “There she is!” we both exclaimed
at once.

Flora, a short way off, stood before us on the grass and smiled as if
her performance was now complete. The next thing she did, however, was
to stoop straight down and pluck—quite as if it were all she was there
for—a big, ugly spray of withered fern. I instantly became sure she had
just come out of the copse. She waited for us, not herself taking a
step, and I was conscious of the rare solemnity with which we presently
approached her. She smiled and smiled, and we met; but it was all done
in a silence by this time flagrantly ominous. Mrs. Grose was the first
to break the spell: she threw herself on her knees and, drawing the
child to her breast, clasped in a long embrace the little tender,
yielding body. While this dumb convulsion lasted I could only watch
it—which I did the more intently when I saw Flora’s face peep at me
over our companion’s shoulder. It was serious now—the flicker had left
it; but it strengthened the pang with which I at that moment envied
Mrs. Grose the simplicity of _her_ relation. Still, all this while,
nothing more passed between us save that Flora had let her foolish fern
again drop to the ground. What she and I had virtually said to each
other was that pretexts were useless now. When Mrs. Grose finally got
up she kept the child’s hand, so that the two were still before me; and
the singular reticence of our communion was even more marked in the
frank look she launched me. “I’ll be hanged,” it said, “if _I’ll_
speak!”

It was Flora who, gazing all over me in candid wonder, was the first.
She was struck with our bareheaded aspect. “Why, where are your
things?”

“Where yours are, my dear!” I promptly returned.

She had already got back her gaiety, and appeared to take this as an
answer quite sufficient. “And where’s Miles?” she went on.

There was something in the small valor of it that quite finished me:
these three words from her were, in a flash like the glitter of a drawn
blade, the jostle of the cup that my hand, for weeks and weeks, had
held high and full to the brim that now, even before speaking, I felt
overflow in a deluge. “I’ll tell you if you’ll tell _me_—” I heard
myself say, then heard the tremor in which it broke.

Mrs. Grose’s suspense blazed at me, but it was too late now, and I
brought the thing out handsomely. “Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel?”

Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was upon us. Much
as I had made of the fact that this name had never once, between us,
been sounded, the quick, smitten glare with which the child’s face now
received it fairly likened my breach of the silence to the smash of a
pane of glass. It added to the interposing cry, as if to stay the blow,
that Mrs. Grose, at the same instant, uttered over my violence—the
shriek of a creature scared, or rather wounded, which, in turn, within
a few seconds, was completed by a gasp of my own. I seized my
colleague’s arm. “She’s there, she’s there!”

Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had
stood the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feeling
now produced in me, my thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. She
was there, and I was justified; she was there, and I was neither cruel
nor mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there
most for Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps so
extraordinary as that in which I consciously threw out to her—with the
sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would catch and
understand it—an inarticulate message of gratitude. She rose erect on
the spot my friend and I had lately quitted, and there was not, in all
the long reach of her desire, an inch of her evil that fell short. This
first vividness of vision and emotion were things of a few seconds,
during which Mrs. Grose’s dazed blink across to where I pointed struck
me as a sovereign sign that she too at last saw, just as it carried my
own eyes precipitately to the child. The revelation then of the manner
in which Flora was affected startled me, in truth, far more than it
would have done to find her also merely agitated, for direct dismay was
of course not what I had expected. Prepared and on her guard as our
pursuit had actually made her, she would repress every betrayal; and I
was therefore shaken, on the spot, by my first glimpse of the
particular one for which I had not allowed. To see her, without a
convulsion of her small pink face, not even feign to glance in the
direction of the prodigy I announced, but only, instead of that, turn
at _me_ an expression of hard, still gravity, an expression absolutely
new and unprecedented and that appeared to read and accuse and judge
me—this was a stroke that somehow converted the little girl herself
into the very presence that could make me quail. I quailed even though
my certitude that she thoroughly saw was never greater than at that
instant, and in the immediate need to defend myself I called it
passionately to witness. “She’s there, you little unhappy thing—there,
there, _there_, and you see her as well as you see me!” I had said
shortly before to Mrs. Grose that she was not at these times a child,
but an old, old woman, and that description of her could not have been
more strikingly confirmed than in the way in which, for all answer to
this, she simply showed me, without a concession, an admission, of her
eyes, a countenance of deeper and deeper, of indeed suddenly quite
fixed, reprobation. I was by this time—if I can put the whole thing at
all together—more appalled at what I may properly call her manner than
at anything else, though it was simultaneously with this that I became
aware of having Mrs. Grose also, and very formidably, to reckon with.
My elder companion, the next moment, at any rate, blotted out
everything but her own flushed face and her loud, shocked protest, a
burst of high disapproval. “What a dreadful turn, to be sure, miss!
Where on earth do you see anything?”

I could only grasp her more quickly yet, for even while she spoke the
hideous plain presence stood undimmed and undaunted. It had already
lasted a minute, and it lasted while I continued, seizing my colleague,
quite thrusting her at it and presenting her to it, to insist with my
pointing hand. “You don’t see her exactly as _we_ see?—you mean to say
you don’t now—_now?_ She’s as big as a blazing fire! Only look, dearest
woman, _look_—!” She looked, even as I did, and gave me, with her deep
groan of negation, repulsion, compassion—the mixture with her pity of
her relief at her exemption—a sense, touching to me even then, that she
would have backed me up if she could. I might well have needed that,
for with this hard blow of the proof that her eyes were hopelessly
sealed I felt my own situation horribly crumble, I felt—I saw—my livid
predecessor press, from her position, on my defeat, and I was
conscious, more than all, of what I should have from this instant to
deal with in the astounding little attitude of Flora. Into this
attitude Mrs. Grose immediately and violently entered, breaking, even
while there pierced through my sense of ruin a prodigious private
triumph, into breathless reassurance.

“She isn’t there, little lady, and nobody’s there—and you never see
nothing, my sweet! How can poor Miss Jessel—when poor Miss Jessel’s
dead and buried? _We_ know, don’t we, love?”—and she appealed,
blundering in, to the child. “It’s all a mere mistake and a worry and a
joke—and we’ll go home as fast as we can!”

Our companion, on this, had responded with a strange, quick primness of
propriety, and they were again, with Mrs. Grose on her feet, united, as
it were, in pained opposition to me. Flora continued to fix me with her
small mask of reprobation, and even at that minute I prayed God to
forgive me for seeming to see that, as she stood there holding tight to
our friend’s dress, her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly
failed, had quite vanished. I’ve said it already—she was literally, she
was hideously, hard; she had turned common and almost ugly. “I don’t
know what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing. I never _have_. I
think you’re cruel. I don’t like you!” Then, after this deliverance,
which might have been that of a vulgarly pert little girl in the
street, she hugged Mrs. Grose more closely and buried in her skirts the
dreadful little face. In this position she produced an almost furious
wail. “Take me away, take me away—oh, take me away from _her!_”

Even Mrs. Grose looked across at me dismayed, while I had nothing to do
but communicate again with the figure that, on the opposite bank,
without a movement, as rigidly still as if catching, beyond the
interval, our voices, was as vividly there for my disaster as it was
not there for my service. The wretched child had spoken exactly as if
she had got from some outside source each of her stabbing little words,
and I could therefore, in the full despair of all I had to accept, but
sadly shake my head at her. “If I had ever doubted, all my doubt would
at present have gone. I’ve been living with the miserable truth, and
now it has only too much closed round me. Of course I’ve lost you: I’ve
interfered, and you’ve seen—under _her_ dictation”—with which I faced,
over the pool again, our infernal witness—“the easy and perfect way to
meet it. I’ve done my best, but I’ve lost you. Goodbye.” For Mrs. Grose
I had an imperative, an almost frantic “Go, go!” before which, in
infinite distress, but mutely possessed of the little girl and clearly
convinced, in spite of her blindness, that something awful had occurred
and some collapse engulfed us, she retreated, by the way we had come,
as fast as she could move.

Of what first happened when I was left alone I had no subsequent
memory. I only knew that at the end of, I suppose, a quarter of an
hour, an odorous dampness and roughness, chilling and piercing my
trouble, had made me understand that I must have thrown myself, on my
face, on the ground and given way to a wildness of grief. I must have
lain there long and cried and sobbed, for when I raised my head the day
was almost done. I got up and looked a moment, through the twilight, at
the gray pool and its blank, haunted edge, and then I took, back to the
house, my dreary and difficult course. When I reached the gate in the
fence the boat, to my surprise, was gone, so that I had a fresh
reflection to make on Flora’s extraordinary command of the situation.
She passed that night, by the most tacit, and I should add, were not
the word so grotesque a false note, the happiest of arrangements, with
Mrs. Grose. I saw neither of them on my return, but, on the other hand,
as by an ambiguous compensation, I saw a great deal of Miles. I saw—I
can use no other phrase—so much of him that it was as if it were more
than it had ever been. No evening I had passed at Bly had the
portentous quality of this one; in spite of which—and in spite also of
the deeper depths of consternation that had opened beneath my
feet—there was literally, in the ebbing actual, an extraordinarily
sweet sadness. On reaching the house I had never so much as looked for
the boy; I had simply gone straight to my room to change what I was
wearing and to take in, at a glance, much material testimony to Flora’s
rupture. Her little belongings had all been removed. When later, by the
schoolroom fire, I was served with tea by the usual maid, I indulged,
on the article of my other pupil, in no inquiry whatever. He had his
freedom now—he might have it to the end! Well, he did have it; and it
consisted—in part at least—of his coming in at about eight o’clock and
sitting down with me in silence. On the removal of the tea things I had
blown out the candles and drawn my chair closer: I was conscious of a
mortal coldness and felt as if I should never again be warm. So, when
he appeared, I was sitting in the glow with my thoughts. He paused a
moment by the door as if to look at me; then—as if to share them—came
to the other side of the hearth and sank into a chair. We sat there in
absolute stillness; yet he wanted, I felt, to be with me.