“You must tell me now—and all the truth. What did you go out for? What
were you doing there?”

I can still see his wonderful smile, the whites of his beautiful eyes,
and the uncovering of his little teeth shine to me in the dusk. “If I
tell you why, will you understand?” My heart, at this, leaped into my
mouth. _Would_ he tell me why? I found no sound on my lips to press it,
and I was aware of replying only with a vague, repeated, grimacing nod.
He was gentleness itself, and while I wagged my head at him he stood
there more than ever a little fairy prince. It was his brightness
indeed that gave me a respite. Would it be so great if he were really
going to tell me? “Well,” he said at last, “just exactly in order that
you should do this.”

“Think me—for a change—_bad!_” I shall never forget the sweetness and
gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of it, he
bent forward and kissed me. It was practically the end of everything. I
met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minute in my
arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given exactly the
account of himself that permitted least of my going behind it, and it
was only with the effect of confirming my acceptance of it that, as I
presently glanced about the room, I could say—

He fairly glittered in the gloom. “Not at all. I sat up and read.”

“I see, I see—it’s charming. But how could you be sure I would know
it?”

“Oh, I arranged that with Flora.” His answers rang out with a
readiness! “She was to get up and look out.”

“Which is what she did do.” It was I who fell into the trap!

“So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at, you also
looked—you saw.”

“While you,” I concurred, “caught your death in the night air!”

He literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford
radiantly to assent. “How otherwise should I have been bad enough?” he
asked. Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview
closed on my recognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his
joke, he had been able to draw upon.

The particular impression I had received proved in the morning light, I
repeat, not quite successfully presentable to Mrs. Grose, though I
reinforced it with the mention of still another remark that he had made
before we separated. “It all lies in half a dozen words,” I said to
her, “words that really settle the matter. ‘Think, you know, what I
_might_ do!’ He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down
to the ground what he ‘might’ do. That’s what he gave them a taste of
at school.”

“I don’t change—I simply make it out. The four, depend upon it,
perpetually meet. If on either of these last nights you had been with
either child, you would clearly have understood. The more I’ve watched
and waited the more I’ve felt that if there were nothing else to make
it sure it would be made so by the systematic silence of each. _Never_,
by a slip of the tongue, have they so much as alluded to either of
their old friends, any more than Miles has alluded to his expulsion.
Oh, yes, we may sit here and look at them, and they may show off to us
there to their fill; but even while they pretend to be lost in their
fairytale they’re steeped in their vision of the dead restored. He’s
not reading to her,” I declared; “they’re talking of _them_—they’re
talking horrors! I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it’s a wonder
I’m not. What I’ve seen would have made _you_ so; but it has only made
me more lucid, made me get hold of still other things.”

My lucidity must have seemed awful, but the charming creatures who were
victims of it, passing and repassing in their interlocked sweetness,
gave my colleague something to hold on by; and I felt how tight she
held as, without stirring in the breath of my passion, she covered them
still with her eyes. “Of what other things have you got hold?”

“Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, at
bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their
more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. It’s a
game,” I went on; “it’s a policy and a fraud!”

“As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems!” The very act of
bringing it out really helped me to trace it—follow it all up and piece
it all together. “They haven’t been good—they’ve only been absent. It
has been easy to live with them, because they’re simply leading a life
of their own. They’re not mine—they’re not ours. They’re his and
they’re hers!”

“Quint’s and that woman’s. They want to get to them.”

Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs. Grose appeared to study them! “But for
what?”

“For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair
put into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the
work of demons, is what brings the others back.”

“Laws!” said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was homely,
but it revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the
bad time—for there had been a worse even than this!—must have occurred.
There could have been no such justification for me as the plain assent
of her experience to whatever depth of depravity I found credible in
our brace of scoundrels. It was in obvious submission of memory that
she brought out after a moment: “They _were_ rascals! But what can they
now do?” she pursued.

“Do?” I echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed at their
distance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at us. “Don’t they
do enough?” I demanded in a lower tone, while the children, having
smiled and nodded and kissed hands to us, resumed their exhibition. We
were held by it a minute; then I answered: “They can destroy them!” At
this my companion did turn, but the inquiry she launched was a silent
one, the effect of which was to make me more explicit. “They don’t
know, as yet, quite how—but they’re trying hard. They’re seen only
across, as it were, and beyond—in strange places and on high places,
the top of towers, the roof of houses, the outside of windows, the
further edge of pools; but there’s a deep design, on either side, to
shorten the distance and overcome the obstacle; and the success of the
tempters is only a question of time. They’ve only to keep to their
suggestions of danger.”

“And perish in the attempt!” Mrs. Grose slowly got up, and I
scrupulously added: “Unless, of course, we can prevent!”

Standing there before me while I kept my seat, she visibly turned
things over. “Their uncle must do the preventing. He must take them
away.”

She had been scanning the distance, but she now dropped on me a foolish
face. “You, miss.”

“By writing to him that his house is poisoned and his little nephew and
niece mad?”

“And if I am myself, you mean? That’s charming news to be sent him by a
governess whose prime undertaking was to give him no worry.”

Mrs. Grose considered, following the children again. “Yes, he do hate
worry. That was the great reason—”

“Why those fiends took him in so long? No doubt, though his
indifference must have been awful. As I’m not a fiend, at any rate, I
shouldn’t take him in.”

My companion, after an instant and for all answer, sat down again and
grasped my arm. “Make him at any rate come to you.”

I stared. “To _me?_” I had a sudden fear of what she might do. “‘Him’?”

“He ought to _be_ here—he ought to help.”

I quickly rose, and I think I must have shown her a queerer face than
ever yet. “You see me asking him for a visit?” No, with her eyes on my
face she evidently couldn’t. Instead of it even—as a woman reads
another—she could see what I myself saw: his derision, his amusement,
his contempt for the breakdown of my resignation at being left alone
and for the fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention
to my slighted charms. She didn’t know—no one knew—how proud I had been
to serve him and to stick to our terms; yet she nonetheless took the
measure, I think, of the warning I now gave her. “If you should so lose
your head as to appeal to him for me—”

“I would leave, on the spot, both him and you.”

It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as
much as ever an effort beyond my strength—offered, in close quarters,
difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation continued a
month, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the note above
all, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the part
of my pupils. It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my
mere infernal imagination: it was absolutely traceable that they were
aware of my predicament and that this strange relation made, in a
manner, for a long time, the air in which we moved. I don’t mean that
they had their tongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for that
was not one of their dangers: I do mean, on the other hand, that the
element of the unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater than
any other, and that so much avoidance could not have been so
successfully effected without a great deal of tacit arrangement. It was
as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects
before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we
perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at
each other—for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had
intended—the doors we had indiscreetly opened. All roads lead to Rome,
and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every
branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.
Forbidden ground was the question of the return of the dead in general
and of whatever, in especial, might survive, in memory, of the friends
little children had lost. There were days when I could have sworn that
one of them had, with a small invisible nudge, said to the other: “She
thinks she’ll do it this time—but she _won’t!_” To “do it” would have
been to indulge for instance—and for once in a way—in some direct
reference to the lady who had prepared them for my discipline. They had
a delightful endless appetite for passages in my own history, to which
I had again and again treated them; they were in possession of
everything that had ever happened to me, had had, with every
circumstance the story of my smallest adventures and of those of my
brothers and sisters and of the cat and the dog at home, as well as
many particulars of the eccentric nature of my father, of the furniture
and arrangement of our house, and of the conversation of the old women
of our village. There were things enough, taking one with another, to
chatter about, if one went very fast and knew by instinct when to go
round. They pulled with an art of their own the strings of my invention
and my memory; and nothing else perhaps, when I thought of such
occasions afterward, gave me so the suspicion of being watched from
under cover. It was in any case over _my_ life, _my_ past, and _my_
friends alone that we could take anything like our ease—a state of
affairs that led them sometimes without the least pertinence to break
out into sociable reminders. I was invited—with no visible
connection—to repeat afresh Goody Gosling’s celebrated _mot_ or to
confirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness of the
vicarage pony.

It was partly at such junctures as these and partly at quite different
ones that, with the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament, as I
have called it, grew most sensible. The fact that the days passed for
me without another encounter ought, it would have appeared, to have
done something toward soothing my nerves. Since the light brush, that
second night on the upper landing, of the presence of a woman at the
foot of the stair, I had seen nothing, whether in or out of the house,
that one had better not have seen. There was many a corner round which
I expected to come upon Quint, and many a situation that, in a merely
sinister way, would have favored the appearance of Miss Jessel. The
summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly
and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and
withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like
a theater after the performance—all strewn with crumpled playbills.
There were exactly states of the air, conditions of sound and of
stillness, unspeakable impressions of the _kind_ of ministering moment,
that brought back to me, long enough to catch it, the feeling of the
medium in which, that June evening out of doors, I had had my first
sight of Quint, and in which, too, at those other instants, I had,
after seeing him through the window, looked for him in vain in the
circle of shrubbery. I recognized the signs, the portents—I recognized
the moment, the spot. But they remained unaccompanied and empty, and I
continued unmolested; if unmolested one could call a young woman whose
sensibility had, in the most extraordinary fashion, not declined but
deepened. I had said in my talk with Mrs. Grose on that horrid scene of
Flora’s by the lake—and had perplexed her by so saying—that it would
from that moment distress me much more to lose my power than to keep
it. I had then expressed what was vividly in my mind: the truth that,
whether the children really saw or not—since, that is, it was not yet
definitely proved—I greatly preferred, as a safeguard, the fullness of
my own exposure. I was ready to know the very worst that was to be
known. What I had then had an ugly glimpse of was that my eyes might be
sealed just while theirs were most opened. Well, my eyes _were_ sealed,
it appeared, at present—a consummation for which it seemed blasphemous
not to thank God. There was, alas, a difficulty about that: I would
have thanked him with all my soul had I not had in a proportionate
measure this conviction of the secret of my pupils.

How can I retrace today the strange steps of my obsession? There were
times of our being together when I would have been ready to swear that,
literally, in my presence, but with my direct sense of it closed, they
had visitors who were known and were welcome. Then it was that, had I
not been deterred by the very chance that such an injury might prove
greater than the injury to be averted, my exultation would have broken
out. “They’re here, they’re here, you little wretches,” I would have
cried, “and you can’t deny it now!” The little wretches denied it with
all the added volume of their sociability and their tenderness, in just
the crystal depths of which—like the flash of a fish in a stream—the
mockery of their advantage peeped up. The shock, in truth, had sunk
into me still deeper than I knew on the night when, looking out to see
either Quint or Miss Jessel under the stars, I had beheld the boy over
whose rest I watched and who had immediately brought in with him—had
straightway, there, turned it on me—the lovely upward look with which,
from the battlements above me, the hideous apparition of Quint had
played. If it was a question of a scare, my discovery on this occasion
had scared me more than any other, and it was in the condition of
nerves produced by it that I made my actual inductions. They harassed
me so that sometimes, at odd moments, I shut myself up audibly to
rehearse—it was at once a fantastic relief and a renewed despair—the
manner in which I might come to the point. I approached it from one
side and the other while, in my room, I flung myself about, but I
always broke down in the monstrous utterance of names. As they died
away on my lips, I said to myself that I should indeed help them to
represent something infamous, if, by pronouncing them, I should violate
as rare a little case of instinctive delicacy as any schoolroom,
probably, had ever known. When I said to myself: “_They_ have the
manners to be silent, and you, trusted as you are, the baseness to
speak!” I felt myself crimson and I covered my face with my hands.
After these secret scenes I chattered more than ever, going on volubly
enough till one of our prodigious, palpable hushes occurred—I can call
them nothing else—the strange, dizzy lift or swim (I try for terms!)
into a stillness, a pause of all life, that had nothing to do with the
more or less noise that at the moment we might be engaged in making and
that I could hear through any deepened exhilaration or quickened
recitation or louder strum of the piano. Then it was that the others,
the outsiders, were there. Though they were not angels, they “passed,”
as the French say, causing me, while they stayed, to tremble with the
fear of their addressing to their younger victims some yet more
infernal message or more vivid image than they had thought good enough
for myself.