Before a new day, in my room, had fully broken, my eyes opened to Mrs.
Grose, who had come to my bedside with worse news. Flora was so
markedly feverish that an illness was perhaps at hand; she had passed a
night of extreme unrest, a night agitated above all by fears that had
for their subject not in the least her former, but wholly her present,
governess. It was not against the possible re-entrance of Miss Jessel
on the scene that she protested—it was conspicuously and passionately
against mine. I was promptly on my feet of course, and with an immense
deal to ask; the more that my friend had discernibly now girded her
loins to meet me once more. This I felt as soon as I had put to her the
question of her sense of the child’s sincerity as against my own. “She
persists in denying to you that she saw, or has ever seen, anything?”

My visitor’s trouble, truly, was great. “Ah, miss, it isn’t a matter on
which I can push her! Yet it isn’t either, I must say, as if I much
needed to. It has made her, every inch of her, quite old.”

“Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world like
some high little personage, the imputation on her truthfulness and, as
it were, her respectability. ‘Miss Jessel indeed—_she!_’ Ah, she’s
‘respectable,’ the chit! The impression she gave me there yesterday
was, I assure you, the very strangest of all; it was quite beyond any
of the others. I _did_ put my foot in it! She’ll never speak to me
again.”

Hideous and obscure as it all was, it held Mrs. Grose briefly silent;
then she granted my point with a frankness which, I made sure, had more
behind it. “I think indeed, miss, she never will. She do have a grand
manner about it!”

“And that manner”—I summed it up—“is practically what’s the matter with
her now!”

Oh, that manner, I could see in my visitor’s face, and not a little
else besides! “She asks me every three minutes if I think you’re coming
in.”

“I see—I see.” I, too, on my side, had so much more than worked it out.
“Has she said to you since yesterday—except to repudiate her
familiarity with anything so dreadful—a single other word about Miss
Jessel?”

“Not one, miss. And of course you know,” my friend added, “I took it
from her, by the lake, that, just then and there at least, there _was_
nobody.”

“Rather! and, naturally, you take it from her still.”

“I don’t contradict her. What else can I do?”

“Nothing in the world! You’ve the cleverest little person to deal with.
They’ve made them—their two friends, I mean—still cleverer even than
nature did; for it was wondrous material to play on! Flora has now her
grievance, and she’ll work it to the end.”

“Why, that of dealing with me to her uncle. She’ll make me out to him
the lowest creature—!”

I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs. Grose’s face; she looked
for a minute as if she sharply saw them together. “And him who thinks
so well of you!”

“He has an odd way—it comes over me now,” I laughed, “—of proving it!
But that doesn’t matter. What Flora wants, of course, is to get rid of
me.”

My companion bravely concurred. “Never again to so much as look at
you.”

“So that what you’ve come to me now for,” I asked, “is to speed me on
my way?” Before she had time to reply, however, I had her in check.
“I’ve a better idea—the result of my reflections. My going _would_ seem
the right thing, and on Sunday I was terribly near it. Yet that won’t
do. It’s _you_ who must go. You must take Flora.”

My visitor, at this, did speculate. “But where in the world—?”

“Away from here. Away from _them_. Away, even most of all, now, from
me. Straight to her uncle.”

“No, not ‘only’! To leave me, in addition, with my remedy.”

She was still vague. “And what _is_ your remedy?”

“Your loyalty, to begin with. And then Miles’s.”

She looked at me hard. “Do you think he—?”

“Won’t, if he has the chance, turn on me? Yes, I venture still to think
it. At all events, I want to try. Get off with his sister as soon as
possible and leave me with him alone.” I was amazed, myself, at the
spirit I had still in reserve, and therefore perhaps a trifle the more
disconcerted at the way in which, in spite of this fine example of it,
she hesitated. “There’s one thing, of course,” I went on: “they
mustn’t, before she goes, see each other for three seconds.” Then it
came over me that, in spite of Flora’s presumable sequestration from
the instant of her return from the pool, it might already be too late.
“Do you mean,” I anxiously asked, “that they _have_ met?”

At this she quite flushed. “Ah, miss, I’m not such a fool as that! If
I’ve been obliged to leave her three or four times, it has been each
time with one of the maids, and at present, though she’s alone, she’s
locked in safe. And yet—and yet!” There were too many things.

“Well, are you so sure of the little gentleman?”

“I’m not sure of anything but _you_. But I have, since last evening, a
new hope. I think he wants to give me an opening. I do believe
that—poor little exquisite wretch!—he wants to speak. Last evening, in
the firelight and the silence, he sat with me for two hours as if it
were just coming.”

Mrs. Grose looked hard, through the window, at the gray, gathering day.
“And did it come?”

“No, though I waited and waited, I confess it didn’t, and it was
without a breach of the silence or so much as a faint allusion to his
sister’s condition and absence that we at last kissed for good night.
All the same,” I continued, “I can’t, if her uncle sees her, consent to
his seeing her brother without my having given the boy—and most of all
because things have got so bad—a little more time.”

My friend appeared on this ground more reluctant than I could quite
understand. “What do you mean by more time?”

“Well, a day or two—really to bring it out. He’ll then be on _my_
side—of which you see the importance. If nothing comes, I shall only
fail, and you will, at the worst, have helped me by doing, on your
arrival in town, whatever you may have found possible.” So I put it
before her, but she continued for a little so inscrutably embarrassed
that I came again to her aid. “Unless, indeed,” I wound up, “you really
want _not_ to go.”

I could see it, in her face, at last clear itself; she put out her hand
to me as a pledge. “I’ll go—I’ll go. I’ll go this morning.”

I wanted to be very just. “If you _should_ wish still to wait, I would
engage she shouldn’t see me.”

“No, no: it’s the place itself. She must leave it.” She held me a
moment with heavy eyes, then brought out the rest. “Your idea’s the
right one. I myself, miss—”

The look she gave me with it made me jump at possibilities. “You mean
that, since yesterday, you _have_ seen—?”

She shook her head with dignity. “I’ve _heard_—!”

“From that child—horrors! There!” she sighed with tragic relief. “On my
honor, miss, she says things—!” But at this evocation she broke down;
she dropped, with a sudden sob, upon my sofa and, as I had seen her do
before, gave way to all the grief of it.

It was quite in another manner that I, for my part, let myself go. “Oh,
thank God!”

She sprang up again at this, drying her eyes with a groan. “‘Thank
God’?”

I couldn’t have desired more emphasis, but I just hesitated. “She’s so
horrible?”

I saw my colleague scarce knew how to put it. “Really shocking.”

“About you, miss—since you must have it. It’s beyond everything, for a
young lady; and I can’t think wherever she must have picked up—”

“The appalling language she applied to me? I can, then!” I broke in
with a laugh that was doubtless significant enough.

It only, in truth, left my friend still more grave. “Well, perhaps I
ought to also—since I’ve heard some of it before! Yet I can’t bear it,”
the poor woman went on while, with the same movement, she glanced, on
my dressing table, at the face of my watch. “But I must go back.”

I kept her, however. “Ah, if you can’t bear it—!”

“How can I stop with her, you mean? Why, just _for_ that: to get her
away. Far from this,” she pursued, “far from _them_—”

“She may be different? She may be free?” I seized her almost with joy.
“Then, in spite of yesterday, you _believe_—”

“In such doings?” Her simple description of them required, in the light
of her expression, to be carried no further, and she gave me the whole
thing as she had never done. “I believe.”

Yes, it was a joy, and we were still shoulder to shoulder: if I might
continue sure of that I should care but little what else happened. My
support in the presence of disaster would be the same as it had been in
my early need of confidence, and if my friend would answer for my
honesty, I would answer for all the rest. On the point of taking leave
of her, nonetheless, I was to some extent embarrassed. “There’s one
thing, of course—it occurs to me—to remember. My letter, giving the
alarm, will have reached town before you.”

I now perceived still more how she had been beating about the bush and
how weary at last it had made her. “Your letter won’t have got there.
Your letter never went.”

She hung fire, but she overcame her reluctance. “I mean that I saw
yesterday, when I came back with Miss Flora, that it wasn’t where you
had put it. Later in the evening I had the chance to question Luke, and
he declared that he had neither noticed nor touched it.” We could only
exchange, on this, one of our deeper mutual soundings, and it was Mrs.
Grose who first brought up the plumb with an almost elated “You see!”

“Yes, I see that if Miles took it instead he probably will have read it
and destroyed it.”

I faced her a moment with a sad smile. “It strikes me that by this time
your eyes are open even wider than mine.”

They proved to be so indeed, but she could still blush, almost, to show
it. “I make out now what he must have done at school.” And she gave, in
her simple sharpness, an almost droll disillusioned nod. “He stole!”

I turned it over—I tried to be more judicial. “Well—perhaps.”

She looked as if she found me unexpectedly calm. “He stole _letters!_”

She couldn’t know my reasons for a calmness after all pretty shallow;
so I showed them off as I might. “I hope then it was to more purpose
than in this case! The note, at any rate, that I put on the table
yesterday,” I pursued, “will have given him so scant an advantage—for
it contained only the bare demand for an interview—that he is already
much ashamed of having gone so far for so little, and that what he had
on his mind last evening was precisely the need of confession.” I
seemed to myself, for the instant, to have mastered it, to see it all.
“Leave us, leave us”—I was already, at the door, hurrying her off.
“I’ll get it out of him. He’ll meet me—he’ll confess. If he confesses,
he’s saved. And if he’s saved—”

“Then _you_ are?” The dear woman kissed me on this, and I took her
farewell. “I’ll save you without him!” she cried as she went.

Yet it was when she had got off—and I missed her on the spot—that the
great pinch really came. If I had counted on what it would give me to
find myself alone with Miles, I speedily perceived, at least, that it
would give me a measure. No hour of my stay in fact was so assailed
with apprehensions as that of my coming down to learn that the carriage
containing Mrs. Grose and my younger pupil had already rolled out of
the gates. Now I _was_, I said to myself, face to face with the
elements, and for much of the rest of the day, while I fought my
weakness, I could consider that I had been supremely rash. It was a
tighter place still than I had yet turned round in; all the more that,
for the first time, I could see in the aspect of others a confused
reflection of the crisis. What had happened naturally caused them all
to stare; there was too little of the explained, throw out whatever we
might, in the suddenness of my colleague’s act. The maids and the men
looked blank; the effect of which on my nerves was an aggravation until
I saw the necessity of making it a positive aid. It was precisely, in
short, by just clutching the helm that I avoided total wreck; and I
dare say that, to bear up at all, I became, that morning, very grand
and very dry. I welcomed the consciousness that I was charged with much
to do, and I caused it to be known as well that, left thus to myself, I
was quite remarkably firm. I wandered with that manner, for the next
hour or two, all over the place and looked, I have no doubt, as if I
were ready for any onset. So, for the benefit of whom it might concern,
I paraded with a sick heart.

The person it appeared least to concern proved to be, till dinner,
little Miles himself. My perambulations had given me, meanwhile, no
glimpse of him, but they had tended to make more public the change
taking place in our relation as a consequence of his having at the
piano, the day before, kept me, in Flora’s interest, so beguiled and
befooled. The stamp of publicity had of course been fully given by her
confinement and departure, and the change itself was now ushered in by
our nonobservance of the regular custom of the schoolroom. He had
already disappeared when, on my way down, I pushed open his door, and I
learned below that he had breakfasted—in the presence of a couple of
the maids—with Mrs. Grose and his sister. He had then gone out, as he
said, for a stroll; than which nothing, I reflected, could better have
expressed his frank view of the abrupt transformation of my office.
What he would not permit this office to consist of was yet to be
settled: there was a queer relief, at all events—I mean for myself in
especial—in the renouncement of one pretension. If so much had sprung
to the surface, I scarce put it too strongly in saying that what had
perhaps sprung highest was the absurdity of our prolonging the fiction
that I had anything more to teach him. It sufficiently stuck out that,
by tacit little tricks in which even more than myself he carried out
the care for my dignity, I had had to appeal to him to let me off
straining to meet him on the ground of his true capacity. He had at any
rate his freedom now; I was never to touch it again; as I had amply
shown, moreover, when, on his joining me in the schoolroom the previous
night, I had uttered, on the subject of the interval just concluded,
neither challenge nor hint. I had too much, from this moment, my other
ideas. Yet when he at last arrived, the difficulty of applying them,
the accumulations of my problem, were brought straight home to me by
the beautiful little presence on which what had occurred had as yet,
for the eye, dropped neither stain nor shadow.

To mark, for the house, the high state I cultivated I decreed that my
meals with the boy should be served, as we called it, downstairs; so
that I had been awaiting him in the ponderous pomp of the room outside
of the window of which I had had from Mrs. Grose, that first scared
Sunday, my flash of something it would scarce have done to call light.
Here at present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my
equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut
my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with
was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking
“nature” into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous
ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but
demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw
of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require
more tact than just this attempt to supply, one’s self, _all_ the
nature. How could I put even a little of that article into a
suppression of reference to what had occurred? How, on the other hand,
could I make reference without a new plunge into the hideous obscure?
Well, a sort of answer, after a time, had come to me, and it was so far
confirmed as that I was met, incontestably, by the quickened vision of
what was rare in my little companion. It was indeed as if he had found
even now—as he had so often found at lessons—still some other delicate
way to ease me off. Wasn’t there light in the fact which, as we shared
our solitude, broke out with a specious glitter it had never yet quite
worn?—the fact that (opportunity aiding, precious opportunity which had
now come) it would be preposterous, with a child so endowed, to forego
the help one might wrest from absolute intelligence? What had his
intelligence been given him for but to save him? Mightn’t one, to reach
his mind, risk the stretch of an angular arm over his character? It was
as if, when we were face to face in the dining room, he had literally
shown me the way. The roast mutton was on the table, and I had
dispensed with attendance. Miles, before he sat down, stood a moment
with his hands in his pockets and looked at the joint, on which he
seemed on the point of passing some humorous judgment. But what he
presently produced was: “I say, my dear, is she really very awfully
ill?”