on mine--gave a shudder and walked to the window;
and while she stood there looking out I completed my statement.

"THAT'S what Flora knows."
After a little she turned round. "The person was in black, you say?"

"In mourning--rather poor, almost shabby. But--yes--with
extraordinary beauty." I now recognized to what I had at last,

stroke by stroke, brought the victim of my confidence, for she quite
visibly weighed this. "Oh, handsome--very, very," I insisted;

"wonderfully handsome. But infamous."
She slowly came back to me. "Miss Jessel--WAS infamous."

She once more took my hand in both her own, holding it
as tight as if to fortify me against the increase of alarm I

might draw from this disclosure. "They were both infamous,"
she finally said.

So, for a little, we faced it once more together; and I found absolutely
a degree of help in seeing it now so straight. "I appreciate,"

I said, "the great decency of your not having hitherto spoken;
but the time has certainly come to give me the whole thing."

She appeared to assent to this, but still only in silence;
seeing which I went on: "I must have it now. Of what did she die?

Come, there was something between them."
"There was everything."

"In spite of the difference--?"
"Oh, of their rank, their condition"--she brought it woefully out.

"SHE was a lady."
I turned it over; I again saw. "Yes--she was a lady."

"And he so dreadfully" target="_blank" title="ad.可怕地；糟透地">dreadfully below," said Mrs. Grose.
I felt that I doubtless needn't press too hard, in such company,

on the place of a servant in the scale; but there was nothing to prevent
an acceptance of my companion's own measure of my predecessor's abasement.

There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more readily
for my full vision--on the evidence--of our employer's late clever,

good-looking "own" man; impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved.
"The fellow was a hound."

Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case
for a sense of shades. "I've never seen one like him.

He did what he wished."
"With HER?"

"With them all."
It was as if now in my friend's own eyes Miss Jessel had again appeared.

I seemed at any rate, for an instant, to see their evocation of her as
distinctly as I had seen her by the pond; and I brought out with decision:

"It must have been also what SHE wished!"
Mrs. Grose's face signified that it had been indeed, but she said

at the same time: "Poor woman--she paid for it!"
"Then you do know what she died of?" I asked.

"No--I know nothing. I wanted not to know; I was glad enough I didn't;
and I thanked heaven she was well out of this!"

"Yet you had, then, your idea--"
"Of her real reason for leaving? Oh, yes--as to that.

She couldn't have stayed. Fancy it here--for a governess!
And afterward I imagined--and I still imagine. And what I

imagine is dreadful."
"Not so dreadful as what _I_ do," I replied; on which I must

have shown her--as I was indeed but too conscious--a front of
miserable defeat. It brought out again all her compassion for me,

and at the renewed touch of her kindness my power to resist broke down.
I burst, as I had, the other time, made her burst, into tears;

she took me to her motherly breast, and my lamentation overflowed.
"I don't do it!" I sobbed in despair; "I don't save or shield them!

It's far worse than I dreamed--they're lost!"
VIII

What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were in the matter I
had put before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution to sound;

so that when we met once more in the wonder of it we were of a common mind
about the duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We were to keep our

heads if we should keep nothing else--difficult indeed as that might be in
the face of what, in our prodigious experience, was least to be questioned.

Late that night, while the house slept, we had another talk in my room,
when she went all the way with me as to its being beyond doubt that I

had seen exactly what I had seen. To hold her perfectly in the pinch
of that, I found I had only to ask her how, if I had "made it up,"

I came to be able to give, of each of the persons appearing to me,
a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their special marks--a portrait

on the exhibition of which she had instantly recognized and named them.
She wished of course--small blame to her!--to sink the whole subject;

and I was quick to assure her that my own interest in it had now
violently taken the form of a search for the way to escape from it.

I encountered her on the ground of a probability that with recurrence--
for recurrence we took for granted--I should get used to my danger,

distinctly professing that my personal exposure had suddenly become
the least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicion that was intolerable;

and yet even to this complication the later hours of the day had brought
a little ease.

On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned
to my pupils, associating the right remedy for my dismay with

that sense of their charm which I had already found to be a thing
I could positivelycultivate and which had never failed me yet.

I had simply, in other words, plunged afresh into Flora's
special society and there become aware--it was almost a luxury!--

that she could put her little conscious hand straight upon
the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet speculation

and then had accused me to my face of having "cried."
I had supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I

could literally--for the time, at all events--rejoice, under this
fathomless charity, that they had not entirely disappeared.

To gaze into the depths of blue of the child's eyes and pronounce
their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty

of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred
to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation.

I couldn't abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat
to Mrs. Grose--as I did there, over and over, in the small hours--

that with their voices in the air, their pressure on one's heart,
and their fragrant faces against one's cheek, everything fell

to the ground but their incapacity and their beauty.
It was a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all,

I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of subtlety that,
in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my show

of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate
the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come

to me as a revelation that the inconceivable communion I
then surprised was a matter, for either party, of habit.

It was a pity that I should have had to quaver out again
the reasons for my not having, in my delusion, so much

as questioned that the little girl saw our visitant even
as I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted,

by just so much as she did thus see, to make me suppose she
didn't, and at the same time, without showing anything,

arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did! It was a pity
that I needed once more to describe the portentous little activity

by which she sought to divert my attention--the perceptible
increase of movement, the greater intensity of play, the singing,

the gabbling of nonsense, and the invitation to romp.
Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it,

in this review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements
of comfort that still remained to me. I should not for instance have

been able to asseverate to my friend that I was certain--which was
so much to the good--that _I_ at least had not betrayed myself.

I should not have been prompted, by stress of need, by desperation
of mind--I scarce know what to call it--to invoke such further

aid to intelligence as might spring from pushing my colleague
fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit by bit, under pressure,

a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong side of it