on the terrace, where, with the lapse of the season, the afternoon

sun was now agreeable; and we sat there together while, before us,
at a distance, but within call if we wished, the children

strolled to and fro in one of their most manageable moods.
They moved slowly, in unison, below us, over the lawn, the boy,

as they went, reading aloud from a storybook and passing
his arm round his sister to keep her quite in touch.

Mrs. Grose watched them with positive placidity; then I caught
the suppressed intellectual creak with which she conscientiously

turned to take from me a view of the back of the tapestry.
I had made her a receptacle of lurid things, but there was an odd

recognition of my superiority--my accomplishments and my function--
in her patience under my pain. She offered her mind to my

disclosures as, had I wished to mix a witch's broth and proposed it
with assurance, she would have held out a large clean saucepan.

This had become thoroughly her attitude by the time that,
in my recital of the events of the night, I reached the point

of what Miles had said to me when, after seeing him, at such
a monstrous hour, almost on the very spot where he happened

now to be, I had gone down to bring him in; choosing then,
at the window, with a concentrated need of not alarming the house,

rather that method than a signal more resonant. I had left
her meanwhile in little doubt of my small hope of representing

with success even to her actualsympathy my sense of the real
splendor of the little inspiration with which, after I had got

him into the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge.
As soon as I appeared in the moonlight on the terrace,

he had come to me as straight as possible; on which I had taken
his hand without a word and led him, through the dark spaces,

up the staircase where Quint had so hungrily hovered for him,
along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, and so to

his forsaken room.
Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered--

oh, HOW I had wondered!--if he were groping about in his
little mind for something plausible and not too grotesque.

It would tax his invention, certainly, and I felt, this time,
over his real embarrassment, a curious thrill of triumph.

It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldn't play any
longer at innocence; so how the deuce would he get out of it?

There beat in me indeed, with the passionate" target="_blank" title="a.易动情的；易怒的">passionate throb of this
question an equal dumb appeal as to how the deuce _I_ should.

I was confronted at last, as never yet, with all the risk
attached even now to sounding my own horrid note.

I remember in fact that as we pushed into his little chamber,
where the bed had not been slept in at all and the window,

uncovered to the moonlight, made the place so clear that there
was no need of striking a match--I remember how I suddenly dropped,

sank upon the edge of the bed from the force of the idea
that he must know how he really, as they say, "had" me.

He could do what he liked, with all his cleverness to help him,
so long as I should continue to defer to the old tradition

of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who
minister to superstitions and fears. He "had" me indeed,

and in a cleft stick; for who would ever absolve me, who would
consent that I should go unhung, if, by the faintest tremor

of an overture, I were the first to introduce into our perfect
intercourse an element so dire? No, no: it was useless

to attempt to convey to Mrs. Grose, just as it is scarcely
less so to attempt to suggest here, how, in our short,

stiff brush in the dark, he fairly shook me with admiration.
I was of course thoroughly kind and merciful; never, never yet

had I placed on his little shoulders hands of such tenderness
as those with which, while I rested against the bed,

I held him there well under fire. I had no alternative but,
in form at least, to put it to him.

"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."

"Do what?"
"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--
"Then you didn't undress at all?"

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

"And when did you go down?"
"At midnight. When I'm bad I AM bad!"

"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.

XII
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."
"Lord, you do change!" cried my friend.

"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