the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview:
hideous just because it WAS human, as human as to have

met alone, in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy,
some adventurer, some criminal. It was the dead silence of our

long gaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror,
huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural. If I had met

a murderer in such a place and at such an hour, we still at
least would have spoken. Something would have passed, in life,

between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved.
The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little

more to make me doubt if even _I_ were in life. I can't
express what followed it save by saying that the silence itself--

which was indeed in a manner an attestation of my strength--
became the element into which I saw the figure disappear;

in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have seen the low
wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an order,

and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch
could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase

and into the darkness in which the next bend was lost.
X

I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect
presently of understanding that when my visitor had gone, he had gone:

then I returned to my room. The foremost thing I saw there
by the light of the candle I had left burning was that Flora's

little bed was empty; and on this I caught my breath with all
the terror that, five minutes before, I had been able to resist.

I dashed at the place in which I had left her lying and over which
(for the small silk counterpane and the sheets were disarranged)

the white curtains had been deceivingly pulled forward;
then my step, to my unutterable relief, produced an answering sound:

I perceived an agitation of the window blind, and the child,
ducking down, emerged rosily from the other side of it.

She stood there in so much of her candor and so little of her nightgown,
with her pink bare feet and the golden glow of her curls.

She looked intensely grave, and I had never had such a sense of losing
an advantage acquired (the thrill of which had just been so prodigious)

as on my consciousness that she addressed me with a reproach.
"You naughty: where HAVE you been?"--instead of challenging

her own irregularity I found myself arraigned and explaining.
She herself explained, for that matter, with the loveliest,

eagerest simplicity. She had known suddenly, as she lay there,
that I was out of the room, and had jumped up to see what had

become of me. I had dropped, with the joy of her reappearance,
back into my chair--feeling then, and then only, a little faint;

and she had pattered straight over to me, thrown herself upon
my knee, given herself to be held with the flame of the candle full

in the wonderful little face that was still flushed with sleep.
I remember closing my eyes an instant, yieldingly, consciously,

as before the excess of something beautiful that shone out of the blue
of her own. "You were looking for me out of the window?" I said.

"You thought I might be walking in the grounds?"
"Well, you know, I thought someone was"--she never blanched as she

smiled out that at me.
Oh, how I looked at her now! "And did you see anyone?"

"Ah, NO!" she returned, almost with the full privilege
of childish inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long

sweetness in her little drawl of the negative.
At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed

she lied; and if I once more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle
of the three or four possible ways in which I might take this up.

One of these, for a moment, tempted me with such singularintensity that,
to withstand it, I must have gripped my little girl with a spasm that,

wonderfully, she submitted to without a cry or a sign of fright.
Why not break out at her on the spot and have it all over?--

give it to her straight in her lovely little lighted face?
"You see, you see, you KNOW that you do and that you already quite

suspect I believe it; therefore, why not franklyconfess it to me,
so that we may at least live with it together and learn perhaps,

in the strangeness of our fate, where we are and what it means?"
This solicitation dropped, alas, as it came: if I could immediately

have succumbed to it I might have spared myself--well, you'll see what.
Instead of succumbing I sprang again to my feet, looked at her bed,

and took a helpless middle way. "Why did you pull the curtain
over the place to make me think you were still there?"

Flora luminously considered; after which, with her little divine smile:
"Because I don't like to frighten you!"

"But if I had, by your idea, gone out--?"
She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame

of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate
as impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine. "Oh, but you know,"

she quite adequately answered, "that you might come back, you dear,
and that you HAVE!" And after a little, when she had got into bed,

I had, for a long time, by almost sitting on her to hold her hand,
to prove that I recognized the pertinence of my return.

You may imagine the general complexion, from that moment, of my nights.
I repeatedly sat up till I didn't know when; I selected moments when my

roommate unmistakably slept, and, stealing out, took noiseless turns
in the passage and even pushed as far as to where I had last met Quint.

But I never met him there again; and I may as well say at once
that I on no other occasion saw him in the house. I just missed,

on the staircase, on the other hand, a different adventure.
Looking down it from the top I once recognized the presence of a woman

seated on one of the lower steps with her back presented to me,
her body half-bowed and her head, in an attitude of woe, in her hands.

I had been there but an instant, however, when she vanished without
looking round at me. I knew, nonetheless, exactly what dreadful face

she had to show; and I wondered whether, if instead of being above I had
been below, I should have had, for going up, the same nerve I had lately

shown Quint. Well, there continued to be plenty of chance for nerve.
On the eleventh night after my latest encounter with that gentleman--

they were all numbered now--I had an alarm that perilously skirted it
and that indeed, from the particular quality of its unexpectedness,

proved quite my sharpest shock. It was precisely the first night during
this series that, weary with watching, I had felt that I might again

without laxity lay myself down at my old hour. I slept immediately and,
as I afterward knew, till about one o'clock; but when I woke it was

to sit straight up, as completely roused as if a hand had shook me.
I had left a light burning, but it was now out, and I felt an instant

certainty that Flora had extinguished it. This brought me to my feet
and straight, in the darkness, to her bed, which I found she had left.

A glance at the window enlightened me further, and the striking of a match
completed the picture.

The child had again got up--this time blowing out the taper, and had again,
for some purpose of observation or response, squeezed in behind

the blind and was peering out into the night. That she now saw--
as she had not, I had satisfied myself, the previous time--was proved

to me by the fact that she was disturbed neither by my reillumination
nor by the haste I made to get into slippers and into a wrap.

Hidden, protected, absorbed, she evidently rested on the sill--
the casement opened forward--and gave herself up. There was a great

still moon to help her, and this fact had counted in my quick decision.
She was face to face with the apparition we had met at the lake,

and could now communicate with it as she had not then been able to do.
What I, on my side, had to care for was, without disturbing her,

to reach, from the corridor, some other window in the same quarter.
I got to the door without her hearing me; I got out of it, closed it,

and listened, from the other side, for some sound from her.
While I stood in the passage I had my eyes on her brother's door,

which was but ten steps off and which, indescribably, produced in me
a renewal of the strange impulse that I lately spoke of as my temptation.

What if I should go straight in and march to HIS window?--what if,
by risking to his boyishbewilderment a revelation of my motive,