This, at all events, was for the time: a time so full that,
as I recall the way it went, it reminds me of all the art

I now need to make it a little distinct. What I look
back at with amazement is the situation I accepted.

I had undertaken, with my companion, to see it out, and I was
under a charm, apparently, that could smooth away the extent

and the far and difficult connections of such an effort.
I was lifted aloft on a great wave of infatuation and pity.

I found it simple, in my ignorance, my confusion, and perhaps
my conceit, to assume that I could deal with a boy whose

education for the world was all on the point of beginning.
I am unable even to remember at this day what proposal I framed

for the end of his holidays and the resumption of his studies.
Lessons with me, indeed, that charming summer, we all had

a theory that he was to have; but I now feel that, for weeks,
the lessons must have been rather my own. I learned something--

at first, certainly--that had not been one of the teachings of
my small, smothered life; learned to be amused, and even amusing,

and not to think for the morrow. It was the first time,
in a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom,

all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature.
And then there was consideration--and consideration was sweet.

Oh, it was a trap--not designed, but deep--to my imagination,
to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever, in me,

was most excitable. The best way to picture it all is to say
that I was off my guard. They gave me so little trouble--

they were of a gentleness so extraordinary. I used to speculate--
but even this with a dim disconnectedness--as to how the rough future

(for all futures are rough!) would handle them and might bruise them.
They had the bloom of health and happiness; and yet,

as if I had been in charge of a pair of little grandees,
of princes of the blood, for whom everything, to be right,

would have to be enclosed and protected, the only form that,
in my fancy, the afteryears could take for them was that of

a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden and the park.
It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke

into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness--
that hush in which something gathers or crouches.

The change was actually" target="_blank" title="ad.事实上；实际上">actually like the spring of a beast.
In the first weeks the days were long; they often, at their finest,

gave me what I used to call my own hour, the hour when, for my pupils,
teatime and bedtime having come and gone, I had, before my final retirement,

a small interval alone. Much as I liked my companions, this hour was
the thing in the day I liked most; and I liked it best of all when,

as the light faded--or rather, I should say, the day lingered and the last
calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from the old trees--

I could take a turn into the grounds and enjoy, almost with a sense
of property that amused and flattered me, the beauty and dignity of

the place. It was a pleasure at these moments to feel myself tranquil
and justified; doubtless, perhaps, also to reflect that by my discretion,

my quiet good sense and general high propriety, I was giving pleasure--
if he ever thought of it!--to the person to whose pressure I had responded.

What I was doing was what he had earnestly hoped and directly asked of me,
and that I COULD, after all, do it proved even a greater joy than I

had expected. I daresay I fancied myself, in short, a remarkable young
woman and took comfort in the faith that this would more publicly appear.

Well, I needed to be remarkable to offer a front to the remarkable things
that presently gave their first sign.

It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour:
the children were tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll.

One of the thoughts that, as I don't in the least shrink now
from noting, used to be with me in these wanderings was that it

would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone.
Someone would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand

before me and smile and approve. I didn't ask more than that--
I only asked that he should KNOW; and the only way to be sure he knew

would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome face.
That was exactly present to me--by which I mean the face was--

when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long
June day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the plantations

and coming into view of the house. What arrested me on the spot--
and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for--

was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real.
He did stand there!--but high up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of

the tower to which, on that first morning, little Flora had conducted me.
This tower was one of a pair--square, incongruous, crenelated structures--

that were distinguished, for some reason, though I could see
little difference, as the new and the old. They flanked opposite

ends of the house and were probably architectural absurdities,
redeemed in a measure indeed by not being wholly disengaged nor

of a height too pretentious, dating, in their gingerbread antiquity,
from a romanticrevival that was already a respectable past.

I admired them, had fancies about them, for we could all profit
in a degree, especially when they loomed through the dusk,

by the grandeur of their actual battlements; yet it was not at
such an elevation that the figure I had so often invoked seemed

most in place.
It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember,

two distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock
of my first and that of my second surprise. My second was a

violent perception of the mistake of my first: the man who met
my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed.

There came to me thus a bewilderment of vision of which,
after these years, there is no living view that I can hope to give.

An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear
to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that faced

me was--a few more seconds assured me--as little anyone
else I knew as it was the image that had been in my mind.

I had not seen it in Harley Street--I had not seen it anywhere.
The place, moreover, in the strangest way in the world, had,

on the instant, and by the very fact of its appearance,
become a solitude. To me at least, making my statement

here with a deliberation with which I have never made it,
the whole feeling of the moment returns. It was as if,

while I took in--what I did take in--all the rest of the scene
had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write,

the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped.
The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly

hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no
other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I

saw with a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the sky,
the clearness in the air, and the man who looked at me over

the battlements was as definite as a picture in a frame.
That's how I thought, with extraordinary quickness,

of each person that he might have been and that he was not.
We were confronted across our distance quite long enough for me

to ask myself with intensity who then he was and to feel,
as an effect of my inability to say, a wonder that in a few

instants more became intense.
The great question, or one of these, is, afterward, I know,

with regard to certain matters, the question of how long
they have lasted. Well, this matter of mine, think what you

will of it, lasted while I caught at a dozen possibilities,
none of which made a difference for the better, that I could see,

in there having been in the house--and for how long, above all?--
a person of whom I was in ignorance. It lasted while I

just bridled a little with the sense that my office demanded
that there should be no such ignorance and no such person.

It lasted while this visitant, at all events--and there was a touch
of the strange freedom, as I remember, in the sign of familiarity

of his wearing no hat--seemed to fix me, from his position,
with just the question, just the scrutiny through the fading light,

that his own presence provoked. We were too far apart
to call to each other, but there was a moment at which,