THE TURN OF THE SCREW


By Henry James


The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the 
obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a 
strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till 
somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a 
visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I may mention, was that of an 
apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for the occasion -an 
appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his 
mother and waking her up in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his 
dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before 
she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this 
observation that drew from Douglas -not immediately, but later in the evening 
-a reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention. 
Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was not 
following. This I took for a sign that he had himself something to produce and 
that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nights later; but 
that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out what was in his mind.
"I quite agree -in regard to Griffin's ghost, or whatever it was -that its 
appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular 
touch. But it's not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to 
have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the 
screw, what do you say to two children - - ?"
"We say, of course," somebody exclaimed, "that they give two turns! Also that 
we want to hear about them."
I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to present his 
back, looking down at his interlocutor with his hands in his pockets. "Nobody 
but me, till now, has ever heard. It's quite too horrible." This, naturally, 
was declared by several voices to give the thing the utmost price, and our 
friend, with quiet art, prepared his triumph by turning his eyes over the rest 
of us and going on: "It's beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know 
touches it."
"For sheer terror?" I remember asking.
He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to 
qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. 
"For dreadful -dreadfulness!"
"Oh, how delicious!" cried one of the women.
He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me, he saw 
what he spoke of. "For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain."
"Well then," I said, "Just sit right down and begin."
He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it an instant. Then 
as he faced us again: "I can't begin. I shall have to send to town." There was 
a unanimous groan at this, at much reproach; after which, in his preoccupied 
way, he explained. "The story's written. It's in a locked drawer -it has not 
been out for years. I could write to my man and enclose the key; he could send 
down the packet as he finds it." It was to me in particular that he appeared 
to propound this -appeared almost to appeal for aid not to hesitate. He had 
broken a thickness of ice, the formation of many a winter; had had his reasons 
for a long silence. The others resented postponement, but it was just his 
scruples that charmed me. I adjured him to write by the first post and to 
agree with us for an early hearing; then I asked him if the experience in 
question had been his own. To this his answer was prompt. "Oh, thank God, no!"
"And is the record yours? You took the thing down?"
"Nothing but the impression. I took that here" -he tapped his heart. "I've 
never lost it."
"Then your manuscript - - ?"
"Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand." He hung fire again. "A 
woman's. She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the pages in 
question before she died." They were all listening now, and of course there 
was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw the inference. But if he put 
the inference by without a smile, it was also without irritation. "She was a 
most charming person, but she was ten years older than I. She was my sister's 
governess," he quietly said. "She was the most agreeable woman I've ever known 
in her position; she would have been worthy of any whatever. It was long ago, 
and this episode was long before. I was at Trinity, and I found her at home on 
my coming down the second summer. I was much there that year -it was a 
beautiful one; and we had, in her off-hours, some strolls and talks in the 
garden -talks in which she struck me as awfully clever and nice. Oh yes; don't 
grin: I liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me too. 
If she hadn't she wouldn't have told me. She had never told anyone. It wasn't 
simply that she said so, but that I knew she hadn't. I was sure; I could see. 
You'll easily judge why when you hear.
"Because the thing had been such a scare?"
He continued to fix me. "You'll easily judge," he repeated: "you will."
I fixed him too. "I see. She was in love."
He laughed for the first time. "You are acute. Yes, she was in love. That is, 
she had been. That came out -she couldn't tell her story without its coming 
out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but neither of us spoke of it. I remember 
the time and the place -the corner of the lawn, the shade of the great beeches 
and the long, hot summer afternoon. It wasn't a scene for a shudder; but oh - 
- !" He quitted the fire and dropped back into his chair.
"You'll receive the packet Thursday morning?" I inquired.
"Probably not till the second post."
"Well then; after dinner - - "
"You'll all meet me here?" He looked us round again. "Isn't anybody going?" It 
was almost the tone of hope.
"Everybody will stay!"
"I will -and I will!" cried the ladies whose departure had been fixed. Mrs. 
Griffin, however, expressed the need for a little more light. "Who was it she 
was in love with?"
"The story will tell," I took upon myself to reply.
"Oh, I can't wait for the story!"
"The story won't tell," said Douglas; "not in any literal, vulgar way."
"More's the pity, then. That's the only way I ever understand."
"Won't you tell, Douglas?" somebody else inquired.
He sprang to his feet again. "Yes -tomorrow. Now I must go to bed. 
Good-night." And quickly catching up a candlestick, he left us slightly 
bewildered. From our end of the great brown hall we heard his step on the 
stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. "Well, if I don't know who she was in 
love with, I know who he was."
"She was ten years older," said her husband.
"Raison de plus -at that age! But it's rather nice, his long reticence."
"Forty years!" Griffin put in.
"With this outbreak at last."
"The outbreak," I returned, "will make a tremendous occasion of Thursday 
night;" and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of it, we lost all 
attention for everything else. The last story, however incomplete and like the 
mere opening of a serial, had been told; we handshook and `candlestruck,' as 
somebody said, and went to bed.
I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had, by the first post, 
gone off to his London apartments; but in spite of -or perhaps just on account 
of -the eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quite let him alone till after 
dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in fact, as might best accord with 
the kind of emotion on which our hopes were fixed. Then he became as 
communicative as we could desire and indeed gave us his best reason for being 
so. We had it from him again before the fire in the hall, as we had had our 
mild wonders of the previous night. It appeared that the narrative he had 
promised to read us really required for a proper intelligence a few words of 
prologue. Let me say here distinctly, to have done with it, that his 
narrative, from an exact transcript of my own made much late, is what I shall 
presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death -when it was in sight 
-committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of these days 
and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began to read to our 
hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. The departing ladies who had 
said they would stay didn't, of course, thank heaven, stay: they departed, in 
consequence of arrangements made, in a rage of curiosity, as they professed, 
produced by the touches with which he had already worked us up. But that only 
made his little final auditory more compact and select, kept it, round the 
hearth, subject to a common thrill.
The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took up the 
tale at a point after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to be in possession 
of was therefore that his old friend, the youngest of several daughters of a 
poor country parson, had, at the age of twenty, on taking service for the 
first time in the schoolroom, come up to London, in trepidation, to answer in 
person an advertisement that had already placed her in brief correspondence 
with the advertiser. This person proved, on her presenting herself, for 
judgment, at a house in Harley Street, that impressed her as vast and imposing 
-this prospective patron proved a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, 
such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a 
fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage. One could easily fix his 
type; it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant, 
off-hand and gay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid, 
but what took her most of all and gave her the courage she afterwards showed 
was that he put the whole thing to her as a kind of favour, an obligation he 
should gratefully incur. She conceived him as rich, but as fearfully 
extravagant -saw him all in a glow of high fashion, of good looks, of 
expensive habits, of charming ways with women. He has for his own town 
residence a big house filled with the spoils of travel and the trophies of the 
chase; but it was to his country home, an old family place in Essex, that he 
wished her immediately to proceed.
He had been left, by the death of their parents in India, guardian to a small 
nephew and a small niece, children of a younger, a military brother, whom he 
had lost two years before. These children were, by the strangest of chances 
for a man in his position, -a lone man without the right sort of experience of 
a grain of patience, -very heavily on his hands. It had all been a great worry 
and, on his own part doubtless, a series of blunders, but he immensely pitied 
the poor chicks and had done all he could; had in particular sent them down to 
his other house, the proper place for them being of course the country, and 
kept them there, from the first, with the best people he could find to look 
after them, parting even with his won servants to wait on them and going down 
himself, whenever he might, to see how they were doing. The awkward thing was 
that they had practically no other relations and that his own affairs took up 
all his time. He had put them in possession of Bly, which was healthy and 
secure, and had placed at the head of their little establishment -but below 
stairs only -an excellent woman, Mrs. Grose, whom he was sure his visitor 
would like and who had formerly been maid to his mother. She was now 
housekeeper and was also acting for the time as superintendent to the little 
girl, of whom, without children of her own, she was, by good luck, extremely 
fond. There were plenty of people to help, but of course the young lady who 
should go down as governess would be in supreme authority. She would also 
have, in holidays, to look after the small boy, who had been for a term at 
school -young as he was to be sent, but what else could be done? -and who, as 
the holidays were about to begin, would be back from one day to the other. 
There had been for the two children at first a young lady whom they had had 
the misfortune to lose. She had done for them quite beautifully -she was a 
most respectable person -till her death, the great awkwardness of which had, 
precisely, left no alternative but the school for little Miles. Mrs. Grose, 
since then, in the way of manners and things, had done as she could for Flora; 
and there were, further, a cook, a housemaid, a dairywoman, an old pony, and 
old groom, and an old gardener, all likewise thoroughly respectable.
So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a question. "And 
what did the former governess die of? -of so much respectability?"
Our friend's answer was prompt. "That will come out. I don't anticipate."
"Excuse me -I thought that was just what you are doing."
"In her successor's place," I suggested, "I should have wished to learn if the 
office brought with it - - "
"Necessary danger to life?" Douglas completed my thought. "She did wish to 
learn, and she did learn. You shall hear tomorrow what she learnt. Meanwhile, 
of course, the prospect struck her as slightly grim. She was young, untried, 
nervous: it was a vision of serious duties and little company, of really great 
loneliness. She hesitated -took a couple of days to consult and consider. But 
the salary offered much exceeded her modest measure, and on a second interview 
she faced the music, she engaged." And Douglas, with this, made a pause that, 
for the benefit of the company, moved me to throw in -
"The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by the splendid 
young man. She succumbed to it."
He got up and, as he had done the night before, went to the fire, gave a stir 
to a log with his foot, then stood a moment with his back to us. "She saw him 
only twice."
"Yes, but that's just the beauty of her passion."
A little to my surprise, on this, Douglas turned round to me. "It was the 
beauty of it. There were others," he went on, "who hadn't succumbed. He told 
her frankly all his difficulty -that for several applicants the conditions had 
been prohibitive. They were, somehow, simply afraid. It sounded dull -it 
sounded strange; and all the more so because of his main condition."
"Which was - - ?"
"That she should never trouble him -but never, never: neither appeal nor 
complain nor write about anything; only meet all questions herself, receive 
all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and let him alone. 
She promised to do this, and she mentioned to me that when, for a moment, 
disburdened, delighted, he held her hand, thanking her for the sacrifice, she 
already felt rewarded."
"But was that all her reward?" one of the ladies asked.
"She never saw him again."
"Oh!" said the lady; which, as our friend immediately left us again, was the 
only other word of importance contributed to the subject till, the next night, 
by the corner of the hearth, in the best chair, he opened the faded red cover 
of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album. The whole thing took indeed more 
nights than one, but on the first occasion the same lady put another question. 
"What is your title?"
"I haven't one."
"Oh. I have!" I said. But Douglas, without heeding me, had begun to read with 
a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the beauty of his 
author's hand.


1

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, like a 
little see-saw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town, to 
meet his appeal I had at all events a couple of very bad days -found all my 
doubts bristle again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this state of 
mind I spent the long hours of bumping swinging coach that carried me to the 
stopping-place at which I was to be met by a vehicle from the house. This 
convenience, I was told, had been ordered, and I found, toward the close of 
the June afternoon, a commodious fly in waiting for me. Driving at that hour, 
on a lovely day, through a country the summer sweetness of which served as a 
friendly welcome, my fortitude revived and, as we turned into the avenue, took 
a flight that was probably but a proof of the point to which it had sunk. I 
suppose I had expected, or had dreaded, something so dreary that what greeted 
me was a good surprise. I remember as a thoroughly pleasant impression the 
broad, clear front, its open windows and fresh curtains and the pair of maids 
looking out; I remember the lawn and the bright flowers and the crunch of my 
wheels on the gravel and the clustered tree-tops over which the rooks circled 
and cawed in the olden sky. The scene had a greatness that made it a different 
affair from my own scant home, and there immediately appeared at the door, 
with a little girl in her hand, a civil person who dropped me as decent a 
curtsey as if I had been the mistress or a distinguished visitor. I had 
received in Harley Street a narrower notion of this place, and that, as I 
recalled it, made me think the proprietor still more of a gentleman, suggested 
that what I was to enjoy might be a matter beyond his promise.
I had no drop again till the next day, for I was carried triumphantly through 
the following hours by my introduction to the younger of my pupils. The little 
girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose affected me on the spot as a creature too 
charming not to make it a great fortune to have to do with her. She was the 
most beautiful child I had ever seen, and I afterwards wondered why my 
employer hadn't made more of a point to me of this. I slept little that night 
-I was too much excited; and this astonished me too, I recollect, remained 
with me, adding to my sense of the liberality with which I was treated. The 
large impressive room, one of the best in the house, the great state bed as I 
almost felt it, the figured full draperies, the long glasses in which, for the 
first time, I could see myself from head to foot, all struck me -like the 
wonderful appeal of my small charge -as so many things thrown in. I should get 
on with Mrs. Grose in a relation over which, on my way, in the coach, I fear I 
had rather brooded. The one appearance indeed that in this early outlook might 
have made me shrink again was that of her being so inordinately glad to see 
me. I felt within half an hour that she was so glad -stout, simple, plain, 
clean, wholesome woman -as to be positively on her guard against showing it 
too much. I wondered even then a little why she should wish not to show it, 
and that, with reflection, with suspicion, might of course have made me uneasy.
But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection with 
anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision of 
whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with the 
restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander about 
my room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch from my open 
window the faint summer dawn, to look at such stretches of the rest of the 
house as I could catch, and to listen, while in the fading dusk the first 
birds began to twitter, for the possible recurrence of a sound or two, less 
natural and not without but within, that I had fancied I had heard. There had 
been a moment when I believed I recognised, faint and far, the cry of a child; 
there had been another when I found myself just consciously starting as at the 
passage, before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancies were not 
marked enough not to be thrown off, and it is only in the light, or the gloom, 
I should rather say, of other and subsequent matters that they now come back 
to me. To watch, teach, `form' little Flora would too evidently be the making 
of a happy and useful life. It had been agreed between us downstairs that 
after the first occasion I should have her as a matter of course at night, her 
small white bed being already arranged, to the end, in my room. What I had 
undertaken was the whole care of her, and she had remained just this last time 
with Mrs. Grose only as an effect of our consideration for my inevitable 
strangeness and her natural timidity. In spite of this timidity -which the 
child herself, in the oddest way in the world, had been perfectly frank and 
brave about, allowing it, without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with 
the deep, sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael's holy infants, to be 
discussed, to be imputed to her and to determine us -I felt quite sure she 
would presently like me. It was part of what I already liked Mrs. Grose 
herself for, the pleasure I could see her feel in my admiration and wonder as 
I sat at supper with four tall candles and with my pupil, in a high chair and 
a bib, brightly facing me between them over bread and milk. There were 
naturally things that in Flora's presence could pass between us only as 
prodigious and gratified looks, obscure and roundabout allusions.
"And the little boy -does he look like her? Is he, too, so very remarkable?"
One wouldn't, it was already conveyed between us, too grossly flatter a child. 
"Oh, miss, most remarkable. If you think well of this one!" -and she stood 
there with a plate in her hand, beaming at our companion, who looked from one 
of us to the other with placid, heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check 
us.
"Yes; if I do - - ?"
"You will be carried away by the little gentleman!"
"Well, that, I think, is what I came for -to be carried away. I'm afraid, 
however," I remember feeling the impulse to add, "I'm rather easily carried 
away. I was carried away in London!"
I can still see Mrs. Grose's broad face as she took this in. "In Harley Street?"
"In Harley Street."
"Well, miss, you're not the first -and you won't be the last."
"Oh, I've no pretensions," I could laugh, "to being the only one. My other 
pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes back tomorrow?"
"Not tomorrow -Friday, miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach, under care 
of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage."
I forthwith wanted to know if the proper as well as the pleasant and friendly 
thing wouldn't therefore be that on the arrival of the public conveyance I 
should await him with his little sister; a proposition to which Mrs. Grose 
assented so heartily that I somehow took her manner as a kind of comforting 
pledge -never falsified, thank heaven! -that we should on every question be at 
one. Oh, she was glad I was there!
What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could be fairly called a 
reaction from the cheer of my arrival; it was probably at the most only a 
slight oppression produced by a fuller measure of the scale, as I walked round 
them, gazed up at them, took them in, of my new circumstances. They had, as it 
were, and extent and mass for which I had not been prepared and in the 
presence of which I found myself, freshly, a little scared not less than a 
little proud. Regular lessons, in this agitation, certainly suffered some 
wrong; I reflected that my first duty was, by the gentlest arts I could 
contrive, to win the child into the sense of knowing me. I spent the day with 
her out of doors; I arranged with her, to her great satisfaction, that it 
should be she, she only, who might show me the place. She showed it step by 
step and room by room and secret by secret, with droll, delightful, childish 
talk about it, and with the result, in half an hour, of our becoming 
tremendous friends. Young as she was I was struck, throughout our little tour, 
with her confidence and courage, with the way, in empty chambers and dull 
corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause, and even on the summit of 
an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy, her morning music, her 
disposition to tell me so many more things than she asked, rang out and led me 
on. I have not seen Bly since the day I left it, and I dare say that to my 
present older and more informed eyes it would show a very reduced importance. 
But as my little conductress, with her hair of gold and her frock of blue, 
danced before me round corners and pattered down passages, I had the view of a 
castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, 
for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of storybooks and 
fairytales. Wasn't it just a storybook over which I had fallen a-doze and 
a-dream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique but convenient house, embodying a few 
features of a building still older, half-displaced and half-utilised, in which 
I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a 
great drifting ship. Well, I was strangely at the helm!


2

This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over with Flora to meet, as 
Mrs. Grose said, the little gentleman; and all the more for an incident that, 
presenting itself the second evening, had deeply disconcerted me. The first 
day had been, on the whole, as I have expressed, reassuring; but I was to see 
it wind up in keen apprehension. The postbag, that evening, -it came late, 
-contained a letter for me, which, however, in the hand of my employer, I 
found to be composed but of a few words enclosing another, addressed to 
himself, with a seal still unbroken. "This I recognise, is from the 
headmaster, and the headmaster's an awful bore. Read him, please; deal with 
him; but mind you don't report. Not a word. I'm off!" I broke the seal with a 
great effort -so great a one that I was a long time coming to it; took the 
unopened missive at last up to my room and only attacked it just before going 
to bed. I had better have let it wait till morning, for it gave me a second 
sleepless night. With no counsel to take, the next day, I was full of 
distress; and it finally got so the better of me that I determined to open 
myself at least to Mrs. Grose.
"What does it mean? The child's dismissed his school."
She gave me a look that I remarked at the moment; then, visibly, with a quick 
blankness, seemed to try to take it back. "But aren't they all - - ?"
"Sent home -yes. But only for the holidays. Miles may never go back at all."
Consciously, under my attention, she reddened. "They won't take him?"
"They absolutely decline."
At this she raised her eyes, which she had turned from me; I saw them fill 
with good tears. "What has he done?"
I hesitated; then I judged best simply to hand her my letter -which, however, 
had the effect of making he, without taking it, simply put her hands behind 
her. She shook her head sadly. "Such things are not for me, Miss."
My counsellor couldn't read! I winced at my mistake, which I attenuated as I 
could, and opened my letter again to repeat it to her; then, faltering in the 
act and folding it up once more, I put it back in my pocket. "Is he really bad?"
The tears were still in her eyes. "Do the gentlemen say so?"
"They go into no particulars. They simply express their regret that it should 
be impossible to keep him. That can have only one meaning." Mrs. Grose 
listened with dumb emotion; she forbore to ask me what this meaning might be; 
so that, presently, to put the thing with some coherence and with the mere aid 
of her presence to my own mind, I went on: "That he's an injury to the others."
At this, with one of the quick turns of simple folk, she suddenly flamed up. 
"Master Miles! him an injury?"
There was such a flood of good faith in it that, though I had not yet seen the 
child, my very fears made me jump to the absurdity of the idea. I found 
myself, to meet my friend the better, offering it, on the spot, sarcastically. 
"To his poor little innocent mates!"
"It's too dreadful," cried Mrs. Grose, "to say such cruel things! Why, he's 
scarce ten years old."
"Yes, yes; it would be incredible."
She was evidently grateful for such a profession. "See him, Miss, first. Then 
believe it!" I felt forthwith a new impatience to see him; it was the 
beginning of a curiosity that, for all the next hours, was to deepen almost to 
pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could judge, of what she had produced in me, and 
she followed it up with assurance. "You might as well believe it of the little 
lady. Bless her," she added the next moment -"look at her!"
I turned and saw that flora, whom, ten minutes before, I had established in 
the schoolroom with a sheet of white paper, a pencil, and a copy of nice 
"round O's" now presented herself to view at the open door. She expressed in 
her little way and extraordinary detachment from disagreeable duties, looking 
to me, however, with a great childish light that seemed to offer it as a mere 
result of the affection she had conceived for my person, which had rendered 
necessary that she should follow me. I needed nothing more than this to feel 
the full force of Mrs. Grose's comparison, and, catching my pupil in my arms, 
covered her with kisses in which there was a sob of atonement.
None the less, the rest of the day, I watched for further occasion to approach 
my colleague, especially as, toward evening, I began to fancy she rather 
sought to avoid me. I over took her, I remember, on the staircase; we went 
down together, and at the bottom I detained her, holding her there with a hand 
on her arm. "I take what you said to me at noon as a declaration that you've 
never known him to be bad."
She threw back her head; she had clearly, by this time, and very honestly, 
adopted an attitude. "Oh, never known him -I don't pretend that!"
I was upset again. "Then you have know him - - ?"
"Yes, indeed, Miss, thank God!"
On reflection I accepted this. "You mean that a boy who never is - - ?"
"Is no boy for me!"
I held her tighter. "You like them with the spirit to be naughty?" Then, 
keeping pace with her answer, "So do I!" I eagerly brought out. "But not to 
the degree to contaminate - - "
"To contaminate?" my big word left her at a loss. I explained it. "To corrupt."
She stared, taking my meaning in; but it produced in her an odd laugh. "Are 
you afraid he'll corrupt you?" She put the question with such a fine bold 
humour that, with a laugh, a little silly doubtless, to match her own, I gave 
way for the time to the apprehension of ridicule.
But the next day, as the hour for my drive approached, I cropped up in another 
place. "What was the lady who was here before?"
"The last governess? She was also young and pretty -almost as young and almost 
as pretty, Miss, even as you."
"Ah, then, I hope her youth and her beauty helped her!" I recollect throwing 
off. "He seems to like us young and pretty!"
"Oh, he did," Mrs. Grose assented: "it was the way he liked everyone!" She had 
no sooner spoken indeed than she caught herself up. "I mean that's his way 
-the master's."
I was struck. "But of whom did you speak first?"
She looked blank, but she coloured. "Why, of him."
"Of the master?"
"Of who else?"
There was so obviously no one else that the next moment I had lost my 
impression of her having accidentally said more than she meant; and I merely 
asked what I wanted to know. "Did she see anything in the boy - - ?"
"That wasn't right? She never told me."
I had a scruple, but I overcame it. "Was she careful -particular?"
Mrs. Grose appeared to try to be conscientious. "About some things -yes."
"But not about all?"
Again she considered. "Well, Miss -she gone. I won't tell tales."
"I quite understand your feeling," I hastened to reply; but I thought it, 
after an instant, not opposed to this concession to pursue: "Did she die here?"
"No -she went off."
I don't know what there was in this brevity of Mrs. Grose's that struck me as 
ambiguous. "Went off to die?" Mrs. Grose looked straight out of the window, 
but I felt that, hypothetically, I had a right to know what young persons 
engaged for Bly were expected to do. "She was taken ill, you mean, and went 
home?"
"She was not taken ill, so far as appeared, in this house. She left it, at the 
end of the year, to go home, as she said, for a short holiday, to which the 
time she had put in had certainly given her a right. We had then a young woman 
-a nursemaid who had stayed on and who was a good girl and clever; and she 
took the children altogether for the interval. But our young lady never came 
back, and at the very moment I was expecting her I heard from the master that 
she was dead."
I turned this over. "But of what?"
"He never told me! But please, Miss," said Mrs. Grose, "I must get to my work."


3

Her thus turning her back on me was fortunately not, for my just 
preoccupations, a snub that could check the growth of our mutual esteem. We 
met, after I had brought home little Miles, more intimately than ever on the 
ground of my stupefaction, my general emotion: so monstrous was I then ready 
to pronounce it that such a child as had now been revealed to me should be 
under an interdict. I was a little late on the scene, and I felt, as he stood 
wistfully looking out for me before the door of the inn at which the coach had 
put him down, that I had seen him, on the instant, without and within, in the 
great glow of freshness, the same positive fragrance of purity, in which I 
had, from the first moment, seen his little sister. He was incredibly 
beautiful, and Mrs. Grose had put her finger on it: everything but a sort of 
passion of tenderness for him was swept away by his presence. What I then and 
there took him to my heart for was something divine that I have never found to 
the same degree in any child -his indescribable little air of knowing nothing 
in the world but love. It would have been impossible to carry a bad name with 
a greater sweetness of innocence, and by the time I had got back to Bly with 
him I remained merely bewildered -so far, that is, as I was not outraged -by 
the sense of the horrible letter locked up in my room, in a drawer. As soon as 
I could compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I declared to her that it was 
grotesque.
She promptly understood me. "You mean the cruel charge - - ?"
"It doesn't live an instant. My dear woman, look at him!"
She smiled at my pretension to have discovered his charm. "I assure you, Miss, 
I do nothing else! What will you say, then?" she immediately added.
"In answer to the letter?" I had made up my mind. "Nothing."
`And to his uncle?"
I was incisive. "Nothing."
"And to the boy himself?"
I was wonderful. "Nothing."
SHe gave with her apron a great wipe to her mouth. "Then I'll stand by you. 
We'll see it out."
"We'll see it out!" I ardently echoed, giving her my hand to make it a vow.
She held me there a moment, then whisked up her apron again with her detached 
hand. "Would you mind, Miss, if I used the freedom - - "
"To kiss me? No!" I took the good creature in my arms and, after we had 
embraced like sisters, felt still more fortified and indignant. 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 if 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 learnt 
something -at first certainly -that had not been one of the teachings of my 
small, smothered life; learnt 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 after-years could 
take for them was that of 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 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, tea-time and 
bed-time 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 dare say 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 not 
of a height too pretentious, dating, in their gingerbread antiquity, from a 
romantic revival 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 solicitude. To me at least, making my statement here 
with a deliberation with which I have never made it, the whole feeling of the 
moment return. 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, afterwards, 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 who, 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, at 
shorter range, some challenge between us, breaking the hush, would have been 
the right result of our strange mutual stare. He was in one of the angles, the 
one away from the house, very erect, as it struck me, and with both hands on 
the ledge. So I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page; then, 
exactly, after a minute, as if to add to the spectacle, he slowly changed his 
place -passed, looking at me hard all the while, to the opposite corner of the 
platform. Yes, I had the sharpest sense that during this transit he never took 
his eyes from me, and I can see at this moment the way his hand, as he went, 
passed from one of the crenellations to the next. He stopped at the other 
corner, but less long, and even as he turned away still markedly fixed me. He 
turned away; that was all I knew.


4

It was not that I didn't wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was rooted as 
deeply as I was shaken. Was there a `secret' at Bly -a mystery of Udolpho or 
an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement? I can't 
say how long I turned it over, or how long, in a confusion of curiosity and 
dread, I remained where I had had my collision; I only recall that when I 
re-entered the house darkness had quite closed in. Agitation, in the interval, 
certainly had held me and driven me, for I must, in circling about the place, 
have walked three miles; but I was to be, later on, so much more overwhelmed 
that this mere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill. The most 
singular part of it in fact -singular as the rest had been -was the part I 
became, in the hall, aware of in meeting Mrs. Grose. This picture comes back 
to me in the general train -the impression, as I received it on my return, of 
the wide white panelled space, bright in the lamplight and with its portraits 
and red carpet, and of the good surprised look of my friend, which immediately 
told me she had missed me. It came to me straightway, under her contact, that, 
with plain heartiness, mere relieved anxiety at my appearance, she nothing 
whatever that could bear upon the incident I had there ready for her. I had 
not suspected in advance that her comfortable face would pull me up, and I 
somehow measured the importance of what I had seen by my thus finding myself 
hesitate to mention it. Scarce anything in the whole history seems to me so 
odd as this fact that my real beginning of fear was one, as I may say, with 
the instinct of sparing my companion. On the spot, accordingly, in the 
pleasant hall and with her eyes on me, I, for a reason that I couldn't then 
have phrased, achieved an inward revolution -offered a vague pretext for my 
lateness and, with the plea of the beauty of the night and of the heavy dew 
and wet feet, went as soon as possible to my room.
Here it was another affair; here, for many days after, it was a queer affair 
enough. There were hours, from day to day, -or at least there were moments, 
snatched even from clear duties, -when I had to shut myself up to think. It 
was not so much yet that I was more nervous than I could bear to be as that I 
was remarkably afraid of becoming so; for the truth I had now to turn over 
was, simply and clearly, the truth that I could arrive at no account whatever 
of the visitor with whom I had been so inexplicably and yet, as it seemed to 
me, so intimately concerned. It took little time to see that I could sound 
without forms of inquiry and without exciting remark any domestic 
complication. The shock I had suffered must have sharpened all my senses; I 
felt sure, at the end of three days and as the result of mere closer 
attention, that I had not been practised upon by the servants nor made the 
object of any `game'. Of whatever it was that I knew nothing was known around 
me. There was but one sane inference: someone had taken a liberty rather 
gross. That was what, repeatedly, I dipped into my room and locked the door to 
say to myself. We had been, collectively, subject to an intrusion; some 
unscrupulous traveller, curious in old houses, had made his way in unobserved, 
enjoyed the prospect from the best point of view, and then stolen out as he 
came. If he had given me such a bold hard stare, that was but a part of his 
indiscretion. The good thing, after all, was that we should surely see no more 
of him.
This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge that what, 
essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my charming work. My 
charming work was just my life with Miles and Flora, and through nothing could 
I so like it as through feeling that I could throw myself into in trouble. The 
attraction of my small charges was a constant joy, leading me to wonder afresh 
at the vanity of my original fears, the distaste I had begun by entertaining 
for the probable grey prose of my office. There was to be no grey prose, it 
appeared, and no long grind; so how could work not be charming that presented 
itself as daily beauty? It was all the romance of the nursery and the poetry 
of the schoolroom. I don't mean by this, of course, that we studied only 
fiction and verse; I mean I can express no otherwise the sort of interest my 
companions inspired. How can I describe that except by saying that instead of 
growing used to them -and it's a marvel for a governess: I call the sisterhood 
to witness! -I made constant fresh discoveries. There was one direction, 
assuredly, in which these discoveries stopped: deep obscurity continued to 
cover the region of the boy's conduct at school. It had been promptly given 
me, I have noted, to face that mystery without a pang. Perhaps even it would 
be nearer the truth to say that -without a word -he himself had cleared it up. 
He had made the whole charge absurd. My conclusion bloomed there with the real 
rose-flush of his innocence: he was only too fine and fair for the little 
horrid, unclean school-world, and he had paid a price for it. I reflected 
acutely that the sense of such differences, such superiorities of quality, 
always, on the part of the majority -which could include even stupid, sordid 
headmasters -turns infallibly to the vindictive.
Both the children had a gentleness (it was their only fault, and it never made 
Miles a muff) that kept them -how shall I express it? -almost impersonal and 
certainly quite unpunishable. They were like the cherubs of the anecdote, who 
had -morally, at any rate -nothing to whack! I remember feeling with Miles in 
especial as if he had had, as it were, no history. We expect of a small child 
a scant one, but there was in this beautiful little boy something 
extraordinarily sensitive, yet extraordinarily happy, that, more than in any 
creature of his age I have seen, struck me a beginning anew each day. He had 
never for a second suffered. I took this as a direct disproof of his having 
really been chastised. If he had been wicked he would have `caught' it, and I 
should have caught it by the rebound -I should have found the trace. I found 
nothing at all, and he was therefore angel. He never spoke of his school, 
never mentioned a comrade or a master; and I, for my part, was quite too much 
disgusted to allude to them. Of course I was under the spell, and the 
wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave 
myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than 
one. I was in receipt in these days of disturbing letters from home, where 
things were not going well. But with my children, what things in the world 
mattered? That was the question I used to put to my scrappy retirements. I was 
dazzled by their loveliness.
There was a Sunday -to get on -when it rained with such force and for so many 
hours that there could be no procession to the church; in consequence of 
which, as the day declined, I had arranged with Mrs. Grose that, should the 
evening show improvement, we would attend together the late service. The rain 
happily stopped, and I prepared for our walk, which, through the park and by 
the good road to the village, would be a matter of twenty minutes. Coming 
downstairs to meet my colleague in the hall, I remembered a pair of gloves 
that had required three stitches and that had received them -with a publicity 
perhaps not edifying -while I sat with the children at their tea, served on 
Sundays, by exception, in that cold, clean temple of mahogany and brass, the 
`grown-up' dining-room. The gloves had been dropped there, and I turned in to 
recover them. The day was grey enough, but the afternoon light still lingered, 
and it enabled me, on crossing the threshold, not only to recognise, on a 
chair near the wide window, then closed, the articles I wanted, but to become 
aware of a person on the other side of the window and looking straight in. One 
step into the room had sufficed; my vision was instantaneous; it was all 
there. The person looking straight in was the person who had already appeared 
to me. He appeared thus again with I won't say greater distinctness, for that 
was impossible, but with a nearness that represented a forward stride in our 
intercourse and made me, as I met him, catch my breath and turn cold. He was 
the same -he was the same, and seen, this time, as he had been seen before, 
from the waist up, the window, though the dining-room was on the ground-floor, 
not going down to the terrace on which he stood. His face was close to the 
glass, yet the effect of this better view was, strangely, only to show me how 
intense the former had been. He remained but a few seconds -long enough to 
convince me he also saw and recognised; but it was as if I had been looking at 
him for years and had known him always. Something, however, happened this time 
that had not happened before; his stare into my face, through the glass and 
across the room, was as deep and hard as then, but it quitted me for a moment 
during which I could still watch it, see it fix successively several other 
things. On the spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it 
was not for me he had come there. He had come for someone else.
The flash of this knowledge -for it was knowledge in the midst of dread 
-produced in me the most extraordinary effect, started, as I stood there, a 
sudden vibration of duty and courage. I say courage because I was beyond all 
doubt already far gone. I bounded straight out of the door again, reached that 
of the house, got, in an instant, upon the drive, and, passing along the 
terrace as fast as I could rush, turned a corner and came full in sight. But 
it was in sight of nothing now -my visitor had vanished. I stopped, I almost 
dropped, with the relief of this; but I took in the whole scene -I gave him 
time to reappear. I call it time, but how long was it? I can't speak to the 
purpose today of the duration of these things. That kind of measure must have 
left me: they couldn't have lasted as they actually appeared to me to last. 
The terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I 
could see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness. There were 
shrubberies and big trees, but I remember the clear assurance I felt that none 
of them concealed him. He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't 
see him. I got hold of this; then, instinctively, instead of returning as I 
had come, went to the window. It was confusedly present to me that I ought to 
place myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and 
looked, as he had looked, into the room. As if, at this moment, to show me 
exactly what his range had been, Mrs. Grose, as I had done for himself just 
before, came in from the hall. With this I had the full image of a repetition 
of what had already occurred. She saw me as I had seen my own visitant; she 
pulled up short as I had done; I gave her something of the shock that I had 
received. She turned white, and this made me ask myself if I had blanched as 
much. She stared, in short, and retreated on just my lines, and I knew she had 
passed out and come round to me and that I should presently meet her. I 
remained where I was, and while I waited I thought of more things than one. 
But there's only one I take space to mention. I wondered why she should be 
scared.


5

Oh, she let me know as soon as, round the corner of the house, she loomed 
again into view. "What in the name of goodness is the matter - - ?" She was 
now flushed and out of breath.
I said nothing till she came quite near. "With me?" I must have made a 
wonderful face. "Do I show it?"
"You're as white as a sheet. You look awful."
I considered; I could meet on this, without scruple, any innocence. My need to 
respect the bloom of Mrs. Grose's had dropped, without a rustle, from my 
shoulders, and if I wavered for the instant it was not with what I kept back. 
I put out my hand to her and she took it; I held her hard a little, liking to 
feel her close to me. There was a kind of support in the shy heave of her 
surprise. "You came for me for church, of course, but I can't go."
"Has anything happened?"
"Yes. You must know now. Did I look very queer?"
"Through this window? Dreadful!"
"Well," I said, "I've been frightened." Mrs. Grose's eyes expressed plainly 
that she had no wish to be, yet also that she knew too well her place not to 
be ready to share with me any marked inconvenience. Oh, it was quite settled 
that she must share! "Just what you saw from the dining-room a minute ago was 
the effect of that. What I saw -just before -was much worse."
Her hand tightened. "What was it?"
"An extraordinary man. Looking in."
"What extraordinary man?"
"I haven't the least idea."
Mrs. Grose gazed round us in vain. "Then where is he gone?"
"I know still less."
"Have you seen him before?"
"Yes -once. On the old tower."
She could only look at me harder. "Do you mean he's a stranger?"
"Oh, very much!"
"Yet you didn't tell me?"
"No -for reasons. But now that you've guessed - - "
Mrs. Grose's round eyes encountered this charge. "Ah, I haven't guessed!" she 
said very simply. "How can I if you don't imagine?"
"I don't in the very least."
"You've seen him nowhere but on the tower?"
"And on this spot just now."
Mrs. Grose looked round again. "What was he doing on the tower?"
"Only standing there and looking down at me."
She thought a minute. "Was he a gentleman?"
I found I had no need to think. "No." She gazed in deeper wonder. "No."
"Then nobody about the place? nobody from the village?"
"Nobody -nobody. I didn't tell you, but I made sure."
She breathed a vague relief: this was, oddly, so much to the good. It only 
went indeed a little way. "But if he isn't a gentleman - - "
"What is he? He's a horror."
"A horror?"
"He's -God help me if I know what he is!"
Mrs. grose looked round once more; she fixed her eyes on the duskier distance, 
then, pulling herself together, turned to me with abrupt inconsequence. "It's 
time we should be at church."
"Oh, I'm not fit for church!"
"Won't it do you good?"
"It won't do them - - !" I nodded at the house.
"The children?"
"I can't leave them now."
"You're afraid - - ?"
I spoke boldly. "I'm afraid of him."
Mrs. Grose's large face showed me, at this, for the first time, the far-away 
faint glimmer of a consciousness more acute: I somehow made out in it the 
delayed dawn of an idea I myself had not given her and that was as yet quite 
obscure to me. It comes back to me that I thought instantly of this as 
something I could get from her; and I felt it to be connected with the desire 
she presently showed to know more. "When was it -on the tower?"
"About the middle of the month. At this same hour."
"Almost at dark?" said Mrs. Grose.
"Oh, no, not nearly. I saw him as I see you."
"Then how did he get in?"
"And how did he get out?" I laughed. "I had no opportunity to ask him! This 
evening, you see," I pursued, "he has not been able to get in."
"He only peeps?"
"I hope it will be confined to that!" She had now let go my hand; she turned 
away a little. I waited an instant; then I brought out: "Go to church. 
Good-bye. I must watch."
Slowly she face me again. "Do you fear for them?"
We met in another long look. "Don't you?" Instead of answering she came nearer 
to the window and, for a minute, applied her ace to the glass. "You see how he 
could see," I meanwhile went on.
She didn't move. "How long was he here?"
"Till I came out. I came to meet him."
Mrs. Grose at last turned round, and there was still more in her face. "I 
couldn't have come out."
"Neither could I!" I laughed again. "But I did come. I have my duty."
"So have I mine," she replied; after which she added: "What is he like?"
"I've been dying to tell you. But he's like nobody."
"Nobody?" she echoed.
"He has no hat." Then seeing in her face that she already, in this, with a 
deeper dismay, found a touch of picture, I quickly added stroke to stroke. "He 
has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, long in shape, with 
straight, good features and little, rather queer whiskers that are as red as 
his hair. His eyebrows are, somehow, darker; they look particularly arched and 
as if they might move a good deal. His eyes are sharp, strange -awfully; but I 
only know clearly that they're rather small and very fixed. His mouth's wide, 
and his lips are thin, and except for his little whiskers he's quite 
clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of sense of looking like an actor."
"An actor!" It was impossible to resemble one less, at least, than Mrs. Grose 
at that moment.
"I've never seen one, but so I suppose them. He's tall, active, erect," I 
continued, "but never -no, never! -a gentleman."
My companion's face had blanched as I went on; her round eyes started and her 
mild mouth gaped. "A gentleman?" she gasped, confounded, stupefied: "a 
gentleman he?"
"You know him then?"
She visibly tried to hold herself. "But he is handsome?"
I saw the way to help her. "Remarkably!"
"And dressed - - ?"
"In somebody's clothes. They're smart, but they're not his own."
She broke into a breathless affirmative groan. "They're the master's!"
I caught it up. "You do know him?"
She faltered but a second. "Quint!" she cried.
"Quint?"
"Peter Quint -his own man, his valet, when he was here!"
"When the master was?"
Gaping still, but meeting me, she pieced it all together. "He never wore his 
hat, but he did wear -well, there were waistcoats missed! They were both here 
-last year. Then the master went, and Quint was alone."
I followed, but halting a little. "Alone?"
"Alone with us." Then, as from a deeper depth, "In charge," she added.
"And what became of him?"
She hung fire so long that I was still more mystified. "He went too," she 
brought out at last.
"Went where?"
Her expression, at this, became extraordinary. "God knows where! He died."
"Died?" I almost shrieked.
She seemed fairly to square herself, plant herself more firmly to utter the 
wonder of it. "Yes. Mr. Quint is dead."


6

It took of course more than that particular passage to place us together in 
presence of what we had now to live with as we could -my dreadful liability to 
impressions of the order so vividly exemplified, and my companion's knowledge, 
henceforth, -a knowledge half consternation and half compassion, -of that 
liability. There had been, this evening, after the revelation that left me, 
for an hour, so prostrate -there had been, for either of us, no attendance on 
any service but a little service of tears and vows, of prayers and promises, a 
climax to the series of mutual challenges and pledges that had straightway 
ensued on our retreating together to the schoolroom and shutting ourselves up 
there to have everything out. The result of our having everything out was 
simply to reduce our situation to the last rigour of its elements. She herself 
had seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow, and nobody on the house but the 
governess was in the governess's plight; yet she accepted without directly 
impugning my sanity the truth as I gave it to her, and ended by showing me, on 
this ground, an awe-stricken tenderness, and expression of the sense of my 
more than questionable privilege, of which the very breath has remained with 
me as that of the sweetest of human charities.
What was settled between us, accordingly, that night, was that we thought we 
might bear things together; and I was not even sure that, in spite of her 
exemption, it was she who had the best of the burden. I knew at this hour, I 
think, as well as I knew later what I was capable of meeting to shelter my 
pupils; but it took me some time to be wholly sure of what my honest ally was 
prepared for to keep terms with so compromising a contract. I was queer 
company enough -quite as queer as the company I received; but as I trace over 
what we went through I see how much common ground we must have found in the 
one idea that, by good fortune, could steady us. It was the idea, the second 
movement, that led me straight out, as I may say, of the inner chamber of my 
dread. I could take the air in the court, at least, and there Mrs. Grose could 
join me. Perfectly can I recall now the particular way strength came to me 
before we separated for the night. We had gone over and over every feature of 
what I had seen.
"He was looking for someone else, you say -someone who was not you?"
"He was looking for little Miles." A portentous clearness now possessed me. 
"That's whom he was looking for."
"But how do you know?"
"I know, I know, I know!" My exaltation grew. "And you know, my dear!"
She didn't deny this, but I required, I felt, not even so much telling as 
that. She resumed in a moment, at any rate: "What if he should see him?"
"Little Miles? That's what he wants!"
She looked immensely scared again. "The child?"
"Heaven forbid! The man. He wants to appear to them." That he might was an 
awful conception, and yet, somehow, I could keep it at bay; which, moreover, 
as we lingered there, was what I succeeded in practically proving. I had an 
absolute certainty that I could see again what I had already seen, but 
something within me said that by offering myself bravely as the sole subject 
of such experience, by accepting, by inviting, by surmounting it all, I should 
serve as an expiatory victim and guard the tranquillity of my companions. The 
children, in especial, I should thus fence about and absolutely save. I recall 
one of the last things I said that night to Mrs. Grose.
"It does strike me that my pupils have never mentioned - - "
She looked at me hard as I musingly pulled up. "His having been here and the 
time they were with him?"
"The time they were with him, and his name, his presence, his history, in any 
way."
"Oh, the little lady doesn't remember. She never heard or knew."
"The circumstances of his death?" I thought with some intensity. "Perhaps not. 
But Miles would remember -Miles would know."
"Ah, don't try him!" broke from Mrs. Grose.
I returned her the look she had given me. "Don't be afraid." I continued to 
think. "It is rather odd."
"That he has never spoken of him?"
"Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were `great friends'?"
"Oh, it wasn't him!" Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. "It was Quint's own 
fancy. To play with him, I mean -to spoil him." She paused a moment; then she 
added: "Quint was much too free."
This gave me, straight from my vision of his face -such a face! -a sudden 
sickness of disgust. "Too free with my boy?"
"Too free with everyone!"
I forbore, for the moment, to analyse this description further than by the 
reflection that a part of it applied to several members of the household, of 
the half-dozen maids and men who were still of our small colony. But there was 
everything, for our apprehension, in the lucky fact that no discomfortable 
legend, no perturbation of scullions, had ever, within anyone's memory, 
attached to the kind old place. It had neither bad name nor ill fame, and Mrs. 
Grose, most apparently, only desired to cling to me and to quake in silence. I 
even put her, the very last thing of all, to the test. It was when, at 
midnight, she had her hand on the schoolroom door to take leave. "I have it 
from you then -for it's of great importance -that he was definitely and 
admittedly bad?"
"Oh, not admittedly. I knew it -but the master didn't."
"And you never told him?"
"Well, he didn't like tale-bearing -he hated complaints. He was terribly short 
with anything of that kind, and if people were all right to him -"
"He wouldn't be bothered with more?" This squared well enough with my 
impression of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very 
particular perhaps about some of the company he kept. All the same, I pressed 
my interlocutress. "I promise you I would have told!"
She felt my discrimination. "I dare say I was wrong. But, really, I was afraid."
"Afraid of what?"
"Of things that man could do. Quint was so clever -he was so deep."
I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. "You weren't afraid of 
anything else? Not of his effect - - ?"
"His effect?" she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while I faltered.
"On innocent little precious lives. They were in your charge."
"No, they were not in mine!" she roundly and distressfully returned. "The 
master believed in him and placed him here because he was supposed not to be 
quite in health and the country air so good for him. So he had everything to 
say. Yes" -she let me have it -"even about them."
"Them -that creature?" I had to smother a kind of howl. "And you could bear it?"
"No. I couldn't -and I can't now!" And the poor woman burst into tears.
A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow them; yet 
how often and how passionately, for a week, we came back together to the 
subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night, I was, in the 
immediate later hours in especial -for it may be imagined whether I slept 
-still haunted with the shadow of something she had not told me. I myself had 
kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs. Grose had kept back. I was sure, 
moreover, by morning that this was not from a failure of frankness, but 
because on every side there were fears. It seemed to me indeed, an raking it 
all over, that by the time the morrow's sun was high I had restlessly read 
into the facts before us almost all the meaning they were to receive from 
subsequent and more cruel occurrences. What they gave me, above all, was just 
the sinister figure of the living man -the dead one would keep awhile! -and of 
the months he had continuously passed at Bly, which, added up, made a 
formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time had arrived only when, on the 
dawn of a winter's morning, Peter Quint was found, by a labourer going to 
early work, stone dead on the road from the village: a catastrophe explained 
-superficially at least -by a visible wound to his head; such a wound as might 
have been produced (and as, on the final evidence, had been) by a fatal slip, 
in the dark and after leaving the public-house, on the steepish icy slope, a 
wrong path altogether, at the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn 
mistaken at night and in liquor, accounted for much -practically, in the end 
and after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything; but there had 
been matters in his life -strange passages and perils, secret disorders, vices 
more than suspected, that would have accounted for a good deal more.
I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible picture 
of my state of mind; but I was in these days literally able to find a joy in 
the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded of me. I now saw 
that I had been asked for a service admirable and difficult; and there would 
be a greatness in letting it be seen -oh, in the right quarter! -that I could 
succeed where many another girl might have failed. It was an immense help to 
me -I confess I rather applaud myself as I look back! -that I saw my response 
so strongly and so simply. I was there to protect and defend the little 
creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most lovable, the appeal of 
whose helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant 
ache of one's own engaged affection. We were cut off, really, together; we 
were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I -well, I had them. 
It was, in short, a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to me in 
an image richly material. I was a screen -I was to stand before them. The more 
I saw the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifled suspense, a 
disguised tension, that might well, had it continued so long, have turned to 
something like madness. What saved me, as I now see, was that it turned to 
another matter altogether. It didn't last as suspense -it was superseded by 
horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yes -from the moment I really took hold.
This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I happened to spend in the 
grounds with the younger of my pupils alone. We had left Miles indoors, on the 
red cushion of a deep window-seat; he had wished to finish a book, and I had 
been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable in a young man whose only defect 
was a certain ingenuity of restlessness. His sister, on the contrary, had been 
alert to come out, and I strolled with her half an hour, seeking the shade, 
for the sun was still high and the day exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh 
with her, as we went out, of how, like her brother, she contrived -it was the 
charming thing in both children -to let me alone without appearing to drop me 
and to accompany me without appearing to oppress. They were never importunate 
and yet never listless. My attention to them all really went to seeing them 
amuse themselves immensely without me: this was a spectacle they seemed 
actively to prepare and that employed me as an active admirer. I walked in a 
world of their invention -that had no occasion whatever to draw upon mine; so 
that my time was taken only with being for them some remarkable person or 
thing that the game of the moment required and that was merely, thanks to my 
superior, my exalted stamp, a happy and highly distinguished sinecure. I 
forget what I was on the present occasion; I only remember that I was 
something very important and very quiet and that Flora was playing very hard. 
We were on the edge of the lake, and, as we had lately begun geography, the 
lake was the Sea of Azof.
Suddenly, amid these elements, I became aware that on the other side of the 
Sea of Azof we had an interested spectator. The way this knowledge gathered in 
me was the strangest thing in the world -the strangest, that is, except the 
very much stranger in which it quickly merged itself. I had sat down with a 
piece of work -for I was something or other that could sit -on the old stone 
bench which overlooked the pond; and in this position I began to take in with 
certitude, and yet without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a 
third person. The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant 
shade, but it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot still hour. 
There was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in the conviction 
I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should see 
straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raising my eyes. 
They were attached at this juncture to the stitching in which I was engaged, 
and I can feel once more the spasm of my effort not to move them till I should 
so have steadied myself as to be able to make up my mind what to do. There was 
an alien object in view -a figure whose right of presence I instantly, 
passionately questioned. I recollect counting over perfectly the 
possibilities, reminding myself that nothing was more natural, for instance, 
than the appearance of one of the men about the place, or even of a messenger, 
a postman or a tradesman's boy, from the village. That reminder had as little 
effect on my practical certitude as I was conscious -still even without 
looking -of its having upon the character and attitude of our visitor. Nothing 
was more natural than that these things should be the other things that they 
absolutely were not.
Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself as soon as 
the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the right second; 
meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough, I transferred my eyes 
straight to little Flora, who, at the moment, was about ten yards away. My 
heart had stood still for an instant with the wonder and terror of the 
question whether she too would see; and I held my breath while I waited for 
what a cry from her, what some sudden innocent sign either of interest or 
alarm, would tell me. I waited, but nothing came; then, in the first place 
-and there is something more dire in this, I feel, than in anything I have to 
relate, -I was determined by a sense that, within a minute, she had, in her 
play, turned her back to the water. This was her attitude when I at last 
looked at her -looked with the confirmed conviction that we were still, 
together, under direct personal notice. She had picked up a small flat piece 
of wood, which happened to have in it a little hole that had evidently 
suggested to her the idea of sticking in another fragment that might figure as 
a mast and make the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched her, she 
was very markedly and intently attempting to tighten in its place. My 
apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that after some seconds I 
felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyes -I faced what I had to 
face.


7

I got hold of Mrs. Grose as soon after this as I could; and I can give no 
intelligible account of how I fought out the interval. Yet I still hear myself 
cry as I fairly threw myself into her arms: "They know -it's too monstrous: 
they know, they know!"
"And what on earth - - ?" I felt her incredulity as she held me.
"Why, all the we know -and heaven knows what else besides!" Then, as she 
released me, I made it out to her, made it out perhaps only now with full 
coherency even to myself. "Two hours ago, in the garden" -I could scarce 
articulate -"Flora saw!"
Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stomach. "She has 
told you?" she panted.
"Not a word -that's the horror. She kept it to herself! The child of eight, 
that child!" Unutterable still, for me, was the stupefaction of it.
Mrs. Grose, of course, could only gape the wider. "Then how do you know?"
"I was there -I saw with my eyes: saw that she was perfectly aware."
"Do you mean aware of him?"
"No -of her." I was conscious as I spoke that I looked prodigious things, for 
I got the slow reflection of them in my companion's face. "Another person 
-this time; but a figure of quite as unmistakable horror and evil: a woman in 
black, pale and dreadful -with such an air also, and such a face! -on the 
other side of the lake. I was there with the child -quiet for the hour; and in 
the midst of it she came."
"Came how -from where?"
"From where they come from! She just appeared and stood there -but not so near."
"And without coming nearer?"
"Oh, for the effect and the feeling, she might have been as close as you!"
My friend, with an odd impulse, fell back a step. "Was she someone you've 
never seen?"
"Yes. But someone the child has. Someone you have." Then, to show how I had 
thought it all out: "My predecessor -the one who died."
"Miss Jessel?"
"Miss Jessel. You don't believe me?" I pressed.
She turned right and left in her distress. "How can you be sure?"
This drew from me, in the state of my nerves, a flash of impatience. "Then ask 
Flora -she's sure!" But I had no sooner spoken than I caught myself up. "No, 
for God's sake, don't! She'll say she isn't -she'll lie!"
Mrs. Grose was not too bewildered instinctively to protest. "Ah, how can you?"
"Because I'm clear. Flora doesn't want me to know."
"It's only then to spare you."
"No, no -there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in 
it, and the more I see in it the more I fear. I don't know what I don't see 
-what I don't fear!"
Mrs. Grose tried to keep up with me. "You mean you're afraid of seeing her 
again?"
"Oh, no; that's nothing -now!" Then I explained. "It's of not seeing her."
But my companion only looked wan. "I don't understand you."
"Why, it's that the child may keep it up -and that the child assuredly will 
-without my knowing it."
At the image of this possibility Mrs. Grose for a moment collapsed, yet 
presently to pull herself together again, as if from the positive force of the 
sense of what, should we yield an inch, there would really be to give way to. 
"Dear, dear -we must keep our heads! And after all, if she doesn't mind it - - 
!" She even tried a grim joke. "Perhaps she likes it!"
"Likes such things -a scrap of an infant!"
"Isn't it just a proof of her blessed innocence?" my friend bravely inquired.
She brought me, for an instant, almost round. "Oh, we must clutch at that -we 
must cling to it! If it isn't a proof of what you say, it's a proof of -god 
knows what! For the woman's a horror of horrors."
Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; than at last 
raising them, "Tell me how you know," she said.
"Then you admit it's what she was?" I cried.
"Tell me how you know," my friend simply repeated.
"know? By seeing her! By the way she looked."
"At you, do you mean -so wickedly?"
"Dear me, no -I could have borne that. She gave me never a glance. She only 
fixed the child."
Mrs. Grose tried to see it. "Fixed her?"
"Ah, with such awful eyes!"
She stared at mine as if they might really have resembled them. "Do you mean 
of dislike?"
"Worse than dislike?" -this left her indeed at a loss.
"With a determination -indescribable. With a kind of fury of intention."
I made her turn pale. "Intention?"
"To get hold of her." Mrs. Grose -her eyes just lingering 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 recognised 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 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 afterwards 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!"


8

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. Later 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 me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their special 
marks -a portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly recognised 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 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 positively cultivate 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 judgement and, so far as might be, my agitation. I 
couldn't adjure 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 out 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 o 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 asservate 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 all still sometimes brushed my brow like 
the wing of a bat; And I remember how on this occasion -for the sleeping house 
and the concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to help -I felt 
the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain. "I don't believe 
anything so horrible," I recollect saying; "no, let us put it definitely, my 
dear, that I don't. But if I did, you know, there's a thing I should require 
now, just without sparing you the least bit more -oh, not a scrap, come! -to 
get out of you. What was it you had in mind when, in our distress, before 
Miles came back, over the letter from his school, you said, under my 
insistence, that you didn't pretend for him that he had not literally ever 
been `bad'? He has not literally `ever,' in these weeks that I myself have 
lived with him and so closely watched him; he has been an imperturbable little 
prodigy of delightful, lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have 
made the claim for him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to 
take. What was your exception, and to what passage in your personal 
observation of him did you refer?"
It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and, at any 
rate, before the grey dawn admonished us to separate I had got my answer. What 
my friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to the purpose. It was 
neither more nor less than the circumstance that for a period of several 
months Quint and the boy had been perpetually together. It was in fact the 
very appropriate truth that she had ventured to criticise the propriety, to 
hint at the incongruity, of so close an alliance, and even to go so far on the 
subject as a frank overture to Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel had, with a most 
strange manner, requested her to mind her business, and the good woman had, on 
this, directly approached little Miles. What she had said to him, since I 
pressed, was that she liked to see young gentlemen not forget their station.
I pressed again, of course, at this. "You reminded him that Quint was only a 
base menial?"
"As you might say! And it was his answer, for one thing, that was bad."
"And for another thing?" I waited. "He repeated your words to Quint?"
"No, not that. It's just what he wouldn't!" she could still impress upon me. 
"I was sure, at any rate," she added, "that he didn't. But he denied certain 
occasions."
"What occasions?"
"When they had been about together quite as if Quint were his tutor -and a 
very grand one -and Miss Jessel only for the little lady. When he had gone off 
with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours with him."
"He then prevaricated about it -he said he hadn't?" Her assent was clear 
enough to cause me to add in a moment: "I see. He lied."
"Oh!" Mrs. Grose mumbled. This was a suggestion that it didn't matter; which 
indeed she backed up by a further remark. "You see, after all, Miss Jessel 
didn't mind. She didn't forbid him."
I considered. "Did he put that to you as a justification?"
At this she dropped again. "No, he never spoke of it."
"Never mentioned her in connection with Quint?"
She saw, visibly flushing, where I was coming out. "Well, he didn't show 
anything. He denied," she repeated; "he denied."
Lord, how I pressed her now! "So that you could see he knew what was between 
the two wretches?"
"I don't know -I don't know!" the poor woman groaned.
"You do know, you dear thing," I replied; "only you haven't my dreadful 
boldness of mind, and you keep back, out of timidity and modesty and delicacy, 
even the impression that, in the past, when you had, without my aid, to 
flounder about in silence, most of all made you miserable. But I shall get it 
out of you yet! There was something in the boy that suggested to you," I 
continued, "hat he covered and concealed their relation."
"Oh, he couldn't prevent - - "
"Your learning the truth? I dare say! But, heavens," I fell, with vehemence, 
a-thinking, "what it shows that they must, to that extent, succeeded in making 
of him!"
"Ah, nothing that's not nice now!" Mrs. Grose lugubriously pleaded.
"I don't wonder you looked queer," I persisted, "when I mentioned to you the 
letter from his school!"
"I doubt if I looked as queer as you!" she retorted with homely force. "And if 
he was so bad then as that comes to, how is he such an angel now?"
"Yes, indeed -and if he was a fiend at school! How, how, how? Well," I said in 
my torment, "you must put it to me again, but I shall not be able to tell you 
for some days. Only, put it to me again!" I cried in a way that made my friend 
stare. "There are directions in which I must not for the present let myself 
go." Meanwhile I returned to her first example -the one to which she had just 
previously referred -of the boy's happy capacity for an occasional slip. "If 
Quint -on your remonstrance at the time you speak of -was a base menial, one 
of the things Miles said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were 
another." Again her admission was so adequate that I continued: "And you 
forgave him that?"
"Wouldn't you?"
"Oh, yes!" And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of the oddest 
amusement. then I went on: "At all events, while he was with the man - - "
"Miss Flora was with the woman. It suited them all!"
It suited me too, I felt, only too well; by which I mean that it suited 
exactly the particularly deadly view I was in the very act of forbidding 
myself to entertain. But I so far succeeded in checking the expression of this 
view that I will throw, just here, no further light on it than may be offered 
by the mention of my final observation to Mrs. Grose. "His having lied and 
been impudent are, I confess, less engaging specimens than I had hoped to have 
from you of the outbreak in him of the little natural man. Still," I mused, 
"they must do, for they make me feel more than ever that I must watch."
It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friend's face how much more 
unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck me as presenting to 
my own tenderness an occasion for doing. This came out when, at the schoolroom 
door, she quitted me. "Surely you don't accuse him - - "
"Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me? Ah, remember that, 
until further evidence, I now accuse nobody." Then, before shutting her out to 
go, by another passage, to her own place, "I must just wait," I wound up.


9

I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from my 
consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant sight of my 
pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to grievous fancies and 
even to odious memories a kind of brush of the sponge. I have spoken of the 
surrender to their extraordinary childish grace as a thing I could actively 
cultivate, and it may be imagined if I neglected now to address myself to this 
source for whatever it would yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, 
was the effort to struggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have 
been, however, a greater tension still had it not been so frequently 
successful. I used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I 
thought strange things about them; and the circumstance that these things only 
made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping them in 
the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they were so immensely more 
interesting. Putting things at the worst, at all events, as in meditation I so 
often did, any clouding of their innocence could only be -blameless and 
foredoomed as they were -a reason the more for taking risks. There were 
moments when, by an irresistible impulse, I found myself catching them up and 
pressing them to my heart. As soon as I had done so I used to say to myself: 
"What will they think of that? Doesn't it betray too much?" It would have been 
easy to get into a sad, wild tangle about how much I might betray; but the 
real account, I feel, of the hours of peace that I could still enjoy was that 
the immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement still effective even 
under the shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it occurred to 
me That I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of my 
sharper passion for them, so too I remember wondering if I mightn't see a 
queerness in the traceable increase of their own demonstrations.
They were at this period extravagantly and preternaturally fond of me; which, 
after all, I could reflect, was no more than a graceful response in children 
perpetually bowed over and hugged. The homage of which they were so lavish 
succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite as well as if I never appeared to 
myself, as I may say, literally to catch them at a purpose in it. They had 
never, I think, wanted to do so many things for their poor protectress; I mean 
-though they got their lessons better and better, which was naturally what 
would please her most -in the way of diverting, entertaining, surprising her; 
reading her passages, telling her stories, acting her charades, pouncing out 
at her, in disguises, as animals and historical characters, and above all 
astonishing her by the `pieces' they had secretly got by heart and could 
interminably recite. I should never get to the bottom -were I to let myself go 
even now -of the prodigious private commentary, all under still more private 
correction, with which, in these days, I overscored their full hours. They had 
shown me from the first a facility for everything, a general faculty which, 
taking a fresh start, achieved remarkable flights. They got their little tasks 
as if they loved them, and indulged, from the mere exuberance of the gift, in 
the most unimposed little miracles of memory. They not only popped out at me 
as tigers and as Romans, but as Shakespeareans, astronomers, and navigators. 
This was so singularly the case that it had presumably much to do with the 
fact as to which, at the present day, I am at a loss for a different 
explanation: I allude to my unnatural composure on the subject of another 
school for Miles. What I remember is that I was content not, for the time, to 
open the question, and that contentment must have sprung from the sense of his 
perpetually striking show of cleverness. He was too clever for a bad 
governess, for a parson's daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not the 
brightest thread in the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the impression 
I might have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was under some 
influence operating in his small intellectual life as a tremendous incitement.
If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone school, it 
was at least as marked that for such a boy to have been `kicked out' by a 
schoolmaster was a mystification without end. Let me add that in their company 
now -and I was careful almost never to be out of it -I could follow no scent 
very far. We lived in a cloud of music and love and success and private 
theatricals. The musical sense in each of the children was of the quickest, 
but the elder in especial had a marvellous knack of catching and repeating. 
The schoolroom piano broke into all gruesome fancies; and when they failed 
there were confabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of them going out 
in the highest spirits in order to `come in' as something new. I had had 
brothers myself, and it was no revelation to me that little girls could be 
slavish idolaters of little boys. What surpassed everything was that there was 
a little boy in the world who could have for the inferior age, sex, and 
intelligence so fine a consideration. They were extraordinarily at one, and to 
say that they never either quarrelled or complained is to make the note of 
praise coarse for their quality of sweetness. Sometimes, indeed, when I 
dropped into coarseness, I perhaps came across traces of little understandings 
between them by which one of them should keep me occupied while the other 
slipped away. There is a naive side, I suppose, in all diplomacy; but if my 
pupils practised upon me, it was surely with the minimum of grossness. It was 
all in the other quarter that, after a lull, the grossness broke out.
I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge. In going on with 
the record of what was hideous at Bly, I not only challenge the most liberal 
faith -for which I little care; but -and this is another matter -I renew what 
I myself suffered, I again push my way through it to the end. There came 
suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, the affair seems to me to have 
been all pure suffering; but I have at least reached the heart of it, and the 
straightest road out is doubtless to advance. One evening -with nothing to 
lead up or to prepare it -I felt the cold touch of the impression that had 
breathed on me the night of my arrival and which, much lighter then, ass I 
have mentioned, I should probably have made little of in memory had my 
subsequent sojourn been less agitated. I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by 
a couple of candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly -last-century 
fiction, some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown, 
but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached the sequestered 
home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth. I remember that the 
book I had in my hand was Fielding's Amelia; also that I was wholly awake. I 
recall further both a general conviction that it was horribly late and a 
particular objection to looking at my watch. I figure, finally, that the white 
curtain draping, in the fashion of those days, the head of Flora's little bed, 
shrouded, as I had assured myself long before, the perfection of childish 
rest. I recollect in short that, though I was deeply interested in my author, 
I found myself, at the turn of a page and with his spell all scattered, 
looking straight up from him and hard at the door of my room. There was a 
moment during which I listened, reminded of the faint sense I had had, the 
first night, of there being something undefinably astir in the house, and 
noted the soft breath of the open casement just move the half-drawn blind. 
Then, with all the marks of a deliberation that must have seemed magnificent 
had there been anyone to admire it, I laid down my book, rose to my feet, and, 
taking a candle, went straight out of the room and, from the passage, on which 
my light made little impression, noiselessly closed and locked the door.
I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I went straight 
along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came within sight of the tall 
window that presided over the great turn of the staircase. At this point I 
precipitately found myself aware of three things. They were practically 
simultaneous, yet they had flashes of succession. My candle, under a bold 
flourish, went out, and I perceived, by the uncovered window, that the 
yielding dusk of earliest morning rendered it unnecessary. Without it, the 
next instant, I saw that there was someone on the stair. I speak of sequences, 
but I required no lapse of seconds to stiffen myself for a third encounter 
with Quint. The apparition had reached the landing halfway up and was 
therefore on the spot nearest the window, where, at sight of me, it stopped 
short and fixed me exactly as it had fixed me from the tower and from the 
garden. He knew me as well as I knew him; and so, in the cold, faint twilight, 
with a glimmer in the high glass and another on the polish of the oak stair 
below, we faced each other in our common intensity. He was absolutely, on this 
occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence. But that was not the 
wonder of wonders; I reserve this distinction for quite another circumstance: 
the circumstance that dread had unmistakably quitted me and that there was 
nothing in me there that didn't meet and measure him.
I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had, thank God, 
no terror. And he knew I had not -I found myself at the end of an instant 
magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigour of confidence, that if 
I stood my ground a minute I should cease -for the time, at least -to have him 
to reckon with; and during the minute, accordingly, 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.


10

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 candour 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, 
yielding, 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 singular intensity 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 frankly confess 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 recognised 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 
room-mate 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 recognised 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, none the less, 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 last 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 afterwards know, 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 not 
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 
boyish bewilderment a revelation of my motive, I should throw across the rest 
of the mystery the long halter of my boldness?
This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold and pause 
again. I preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what might portentously 
be; I wondered if his bed were also empty and he too were secretly at watch. 
It was a deep, soundless minute, at the end of which my impulse failed. He was 
quiet; he might be innocent; the risk was hideous; I turned away. There was a 
figure in the grounds -a figure prowling for a sight, the visitor with whom 
Flora was engaged; but it was not the visitor most concerned with my boy. I 
hesitated afresh, but on other grounds and only a few seconds; then I had made 
my choice. There were empty room at Bly, and it was only a question of 
choosing the right one. The right one suddenly presented itself to me as the 
lower on -though high above the gardens -in the solid corner of the house that 
I have spoken of as the old tower. This was a large, square chamber, arranged 
with some state as a bedroom, the extravagant size of which made it so 
inconvenient that it had not for years, though kept by Mrs. Grose in exemplary 
order, been occupied. I had often admired it and I knew my way about in it; I 
had only, after just faltering at the first chill gloom of its disuse, to pass 
across it and unbolt as quietly as I could one of the shutters. Achieving this 
transit, I uncovered the glass without a sound and, applying my face to the 
pane, was able, the darkness without being much less than within, to see that 
I commanded the right direction. Then I saw something more. The moon made the 
night extraordinarily penetrable and showed me on the lawn a person, 
diminished by distance, who stood there motionless as if fascinated, looking 
up to where I had appeared -looking, that is, not so much straight at me as at 
something that was apparently above me. There was clearly another person above 
me -there was a person on the tower; but the presence on the lawn was not in 
the least what I had conceived and had confidently hurried to meet. The 
presence on the lawn -I felt sick as I made it out -was poor little Miles 
himself.


11

It was not till late next day that I spoke to Mrs. Grose; the rigour with 
which I kept my pupils in sight making it often difficult to meet her 
privately, and the more as we each felt the importance of not provoking -on 
the part of the servants quite as much as on that of the children -any 
suspicion of a secret flurry or of a discussion of mysteries. I drew a great 
security in this particular from her smooth aspect. There was nothing in her 
fresh face to pass on to others my horrible confidences. She believed me, I 
was sure, absolutely: if she hadn't I don't know what would have become of me, 
for I couldn't have borne the business alone. But she was a magnificent 
monument to the blessing of a want of imagination, and if she could see in our 
little charges nothing but their beauty and amiability, their happiness and 
cleverness, she had no direct communication with the sources of my trouble. If 
they had been at all visibly blighted or battered, she would doubtless have 
grown, on tracing it back, haggard enough to match them; as matters stood, 
however, I could feel her, when she surveyed them, with her large white arms 
folded and the habit of serenity in all her look, thank the Lord's mercy that 
if they were ruined the pieces would still serve. Flights of fancy gave place, 
in her mind, to a steady fireside glow, and I had already begun to perceive 
how, with the development of the conviction that -as time went on without a 
public accident -our young things could, after all, look out for themselves, 
she addressed her greatest solicitude to the sad case presented by their 
instructress. That, for myself, was a sound simplification: I could engage 
that, to the world, my face should tell no tales, but it would have been, in 
the conditions, an immense added strain to find myself anxious about hers.
At the hour I now speak of she had joined me, under pressure, 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 actual sympathy my sense 
of the real splendour 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 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, leapt 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.


12

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 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!"
"On the part of little darlings - - ?"
"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?"
"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."
"For the children to come?"
"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."
"And who's to make him?"
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?"
"But if they are, Miss?"
"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 started. "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 none the less 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 - - "
She was really frightened. "Yes, Miss?"
"I would leave, on the spot, both him and you."


13

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 those of my brothers and 
sisters and of the cat and dog at home, as well as many particulars of the 
whimsical bent of my father, of the furniture and arrangement of out 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 afterwards, 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 one 
that, with the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament, as I have called 
it, grew more 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 favoured 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 grey 
sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was 
like a theatre 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 recognised the sighs, the portents 
-I recognised 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 know. 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 of 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. 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 conclusions. 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.
What it was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that, whatever I 
had seen, Miles and Flora saw more -things terrible and unguessable and that 
sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in the past. Such things 
naturally left on the surface, for the time, a chill which we voiciferously 
denied that we felt; and we had, all three, with repetition, got into such 
splendid training that we went, each time, almost automatically, to mark the 
close of the incident, through the very same movements. it was striking of the 
children, at all events, to kiss me inveterately with a kind of wild 
irrelevance and never to fail -one or the other -of the precious question that 
had helped us through many a peril' "When do you think he will come? Don't you 
think we ought to write?" -there was nothing like that inquiry, we found by 
experience, for carrying off an awkwardness. `He' of course was their uncle in 
Harley Street; and we lived in much profusion of theory that he might at any 
moment arrive to mingle in our circle. It was impossible to have given less 
encouragement than he had administered to such a doctrine, but if we had not 
had the doctrine to fall back upon we should have deprived each other of some 
of our finest exhibitions. He never wrote to them -that may have been selfish, 
but it was a part of the flattery of his trust of myself; for the way in which 
a man pays his highest tribute to a woman is apt to be but by the more festal 
celebration of one of the sacred laws of his comfort; and I held that I 
carried out the spirit of the pledge given not to appeal to him when I let our 
young friends understand that their own letters were but charming literary 
exercises. They were too beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself; I have 
them all to this hour. This was a rule, indeed, which only added to the 
satiric effect of my being plied with the supposition that he might at any 
moment be among us. It was exactly as if my charges knew how almost more 
awkward than anything else that might be for me. There appears to me, 
moreover, as I look back, no note in all this more extraordinary than the mere 
fact that, in spite of my tension and of their triumph, I never lost patience 
with the,. Adorable they must in truth have been, I now feel, since I didn't 
in these days hate them! Would exasperation, however, if relief had longer 
been postponed, finally have betrayed me? It little matters, for relief 
arrived. I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to 
a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at 
least change, and it came with a rush.


14

Walking to church a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at my side and 
his sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Grose's, well in sight. It was a 
crisp, clear day, the first of its order for some time; the night had brought 
a touch of frost and the autumn air, bright and sharp, made the church bells 
almost gay. It was an odd accident of thought that I should have happened at 
such a moment to be particularly and very gratefully struck with the obedience 
of my little charges. Why did they never resent my inexorable, my perpetual 
society? Something or other had brought nearer home to me that I had all but 
pinned the boy to my shawl, and that in the way our companions were marshalled 
before I might have appeared to provide against some danger of rebellion. I 
was like a jailer with an eye to possible surprises and escapes. But all this 
belonged -I mean their magnificent little surrender -just to the special array 
of the facts that were most abysmal. Turned out for Sunday by his uncle's 
tailor, who had had a free hand and a notion of pretty waistcoats and of his 
grand little air, Miles's whole title to independence, the rights of his sex 
and situation, were so stamped upon him that if he had suddenly struck for 
freedom I should have had nothing to say. I was by the strangest of chances 
wondering how I should meet him when the revolution unmistakably occurred. I 
call it a revolution because I now see how, with the word he spoke, the 
curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama and the catastrophe was 
precipitated. "Look here, my dear, you know," he charmingly said, "when in the 
world, please, am I going back to school?"
Transcribed here the speech sounds harmless enough, particularly as uttered in 
the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all interlocutors, but above all 
at his eternal governess, he threw off intonations as if he were tossing 
roses. There was something in them that always made one `catch', and I caught 
at any rate now so effectually that I stopped as short as if one of the trees 
of the park had fallen across the road. There was something new, on the spot, 
between us, and he was perfectly aware I recognised it, though to enable me to 
do so he had no need to look a whit less candid and charming than usual. I 
could feel in him how he already, from my at first finding nothing to reply, 
perceived the advantage he had gained. I was so slow to find anything that he 
had plenty of time, after a minute, to continue with his suggestive but 
inconclusive smile: "You know, my dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady 
always - - !" His `my dear' was constantly on his lips for me, and nothing 
could have expressed more the exact shade of the sentiment with which I 
desired to inspire my pupils than its fond familiarity. It was so respectfully 
easy.
But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! I remember 
that, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see in the beautiful 
face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I looked. "And always with 
the same lady?" I returned.
He neither blenched of winked. The whole thing was virtually out between us. 
"Ah, of course, she's a jolly, `perfect' lady; but, after all, I'm a fellow, 
don't you see? that's -well, getting on."
I lingered there with him an instant ever so kindly. "Yes, you're getting on." 
Oh, but I felt helpless!
I have kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed to know 
that and to play with it. "And you can't say I've not been awfully good, can 
you?"
I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it would 
have been to walk on, I was not yet quite able. "No, I can't say that, Miles."
"Except just that one night, you know - - !"
"That one night?" I couldn't look as straight as he.
"Why, when I went down -went out of the house."
"Oh, yes. But I forget what you did it for."
"You forget?" -he spoke with the sweet extravagance of childish reproach. 
"Why, it was to show you I could!"
"Oh, yes, you could."
"And I can again."
I felt that I might, perhaps, after all succeed in keeping my wits about me. 
"Certainly. But you won't."
"No, not that again. It was nothing."
"It was nothing," I said. "But we must go on."
He resumed our walk with me, passing his hand into my arm. "Then when am I 
going back?"
I wore, in turning it over, my most responsible air. "Were you very happy at 
school?"
He just considered. "Oh, I'm happy enough anywhere!"
"Well, then," I quavered, "if you're just as happy here - - !"
"Ah, but that isn't everything! Of course you know a lot - - "
"But you hint that you know almost as much?" I risked as he paused.
"Not half I want to!" Miles honestly professed. "But it isn't so much that."
"What is it, then?"
"Well -I want to see more life."
"I see; I see." We had arrived within sight of the church and of various 
persons, including several of the household of Bly, on their way to it and 
clustered about the door to see us go in. I quickened our step; I wanted to 
get there before the question between us opened up much further; I reflected 
hungrily that, for more than an hour, he would have to be silent; and I 
thought with envy of the comparative dusk of the pew and of the almost 
spiritual help of the hassock on which I might bend my knees. I seemed 
literally to be running a race with some confusion to which he was about to 
reduce me, but I felt that he had got in first when, before we had even 
entered the churchyard, he threw out -
"I want my own sort!"
It literally made me bound forward. "There are not many of your own sort, 
Miles!" I laughed. "Unless perhaps dear little Flora!"
"You really compare me to a baby girl?"
This found me singularly weak. "Don't you, then, love our sweet Flora?"
"If I didn't -and you too; if I didn't - - !" he repeated as if retreating for 
a jump, yet leaving his thought so unfinished that, after we had come into the 
gate, another stop, which he imposed on me by the pressure of his arm, had 
become inevitable. Mrs. Grose and Flora had passed into the church, the other 
worshippers had followed, and we were, for the minute, alone among the old, 
thick graves. We had paused, on the path from the gate, by a low, oblong, 
table-like tomb.
"Yes, if you didn't - - ?"
He looked, while I waited, about at the graves. "Well, you know what!" But he 
didn't move, and he presently produced something that made me drop straight 
down on the stone slab, as if suddenly to rest. "does my uncle think what you 
think?"
I markedly rested. "How do you know what I think?"
"Ah, well, of course I don't; for it strikes me you never tell me. But I mean 
does he know?"
"Know what, Miles?"
"Why, the way I'm going on."
I perceived quickly enough that I could make, to this inquiry, no answer that 
would not involve something of a sacrifice of my employer. Yet it appeared to 
me that we were all, at Bly, sufficiently sacrificed to make that venial. "I 
don't think you uncle much cares."
Miles, on this, stood looking at me. "Then don't you think he can be made to?"
"In what way?"
"Why, by his coming down."
"But who'll get him to come down?"
"I will!" the boy said with extraordinary brightness and emphasis. He gave me 
another look charged with that expression and then marched off alone into 
church.


15

The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed him. It 
was a pitiful surrender to agitation, by my being aware of this had somehow no 
power to restore me. I only sat there on my tomb and read into what my little 
friend had said to me the fullness of its meaning; by the time I had grasped 
the whole of which I had also embraced, for absence, the pretext that I was 
ashamed to offer my pupils and the rest of the congregation such an example of 
delay. What I said to myself above all was that Miles had got something out of 
me and that the proof of it, for him, would be just this awkward collapse. He 
had got out of me that there was something I was much afraid of and that he 
should probably be able to make use of my fear to gain, for his own purpose, 
more freedom. My fear was of having to deal with the intolerable question of 
the grounds of his dismissal from school, for that was really but the question 
of the horrors gathered behind. That his uncle should arrive to treat with me 
of these things was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have 
desired to bring on; but I could so little face the ugliness and the pain of 
it that I simply procrastinated and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to my 
deep discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to say to me: 
"Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this interruption of my 
studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you a life that's so unnatural 
for a boy." What was so unnatural for the particular boy I was concerned with 
was this sudden revelation of a consciousness and a plan.
That was what really overcame me, what prevented my going in. I walked round 
the church, hesitating, hovering; I reflected that I had already, with him, 
hurt myself beyond repair. Therefore I could patch up nothing, and it was too 
extreme an effort to squeeze beside him into the pew: he would be so much more 
sure than ever to pass his arm into mine and make me sit there for an hour in 
close, silent contact with his commentary on our talk. For the first minutes 
since his arrival I wanted to get away from him. As I paused beneath the high 
east window and listened to the sounds of worship, I was taken with an impulse 
that might master me, I felt, completely should I give it the least 
encouragement. I might easily put an end to my predicament by getting away 
altogether. Here was my chance; there was no one to stop me; I could give the 
whole thing up -turn my back and retreat. It was only a question of hurrying 
again, for a few preparations, to the house which the attendance at church of 
so many of the servants would practically have left unoccupied. No one, in 
short, could blame me if I should just drive desperately off. What was it to 
get away if I got away only till dinner? That would be in a couple of hours, 
at the end of which -I had the acute prevision -my little pupils would play at 
innocent wonder about my non-appearance in their train.
"What did you do, you naughty, bad thing? Why in the world, to worry us so 
-and take our thoughts off too, don't you know? -did you desert us at the very 
door?" I couldn't meet such questions nor, as they asked them, their false 
little lovely eyes; yet it was all so exactly what I should have to meet that, 
as the prospect grew sharp to me, I at last let myself go.
I got, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away; I came straight out 
of the churchyard and, thinking hard, retraced my steps through the park. It 
seemed to me that by the time I reached the house I had made up my mind I 
would fly. The Sunday stillness both of the approaches and of the interior, in 
which I met no one, fairly excited me with a sense of opportunity. Were I to 
get off quickly, this way, I should get off without a scene, without a word. 
My quickness would have to remarkable, however, and the question of a 
conveyance was the great one to settle. Tormented, in the hall, with 
difficulties and obstacles, I remember sinking down at the foot of the 
staircase -suddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and then, with a 
revulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month before, in 
the darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things, I had seen the 
spectre of the most horrible of women. At this I was able to straighten 
myself; I went the rest of the way up; I made, in my bewilderment, for the 
schoolroom, where there were objects belonging to me that I should have to 
take. But I opened the door to find again, in a flash, my eyes unsealed. In 
the presence of what I saw I reeled straight back upon my resistance.
Seated at my own table in clear noonday light I say a person whom, without my 
previous experience, I should have taken at the first blush for some housemaid 
who might have stayed at home to look after the place and who, availing 
herself of rare relief from observation and of the schoolroom table and my 
pens, ink, and paper, had applied herself to the considerable effort of a 
letter to her sweetheart. There was an effort in the way that, while her arms 
rested on the table, her hands with evident weariness supported her head; but 
at the moment I took this in I had already become aware that, in spite of my 
entrance, her attitude strangely persisted. Then it was -with the very act of 
its announcing itself -that her identity flared up in a change of posture. She 
rose, not as if she had heard me, but with an indescribable grand melancholy 
of indifference and detachment, and, within a dozen feet of me, stood there as 
my vile predecessor. Dishonoured and tragic, she was all before me; but even 
as I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image passed away. Dark as 
midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and her unutterable woe, she 
had looked at me long enough to appear to say that her right to sit at my 
table was as good as mine to sit at hers. While these instants lasted indeed I 
had the extraordinary chill of a feeling that it was I who was the intruder. 
It was as a wild protest against it that, actually addressing her -"You 
terrible, miserable woman!" -I heard myself break into a sound that, by the 
open door, rang through the long passage and the empty house. She looked at me 
as if she heard me, but I had recovered myself and cleared the air. There was 
nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must 
stay.


16

I had so perfectly expected that the return of the others to be marked by a 
demonstration that I was freshly upset at having to find them merely dumb and 
discreet about my desertion. Instead of gaily denouncing and caressing me they 
made no allusion to my having failed them, and I was left, for the time, on 
perceiving that she too said nothing, to study Mrs. Grose's odd face. I did 
this to such purpose that I made sure they had in some way bribed her to 
silence; a silence that, however, I would engage to break down on the first 
private opportunity. This opportunity came before tea: I secured five minutes 
with her in the housekeeper's room, where, in the twilight, amid a smell of 
lately-baked bread, but with the place all swept and garnished, I found her 
sitting in pained placidity before the fire. So I see her still, so I see her 
best: facing the flame from her straight chair in the dusky, shining room, a 
large, clean picture of the `put away' -of drawers closed and locked and rest 
without a remedy.
"Oh, yes, they asked me to say nothing; and to please them -so long as they 
were there -of course I promised. But what had happened to you?"
"I only went with you for the walk," I said. "I had then to come back to meet 
a friend."
She showed her surprise. "A friend -you?"
"Oh, yes, I've a couple!" I laughed. "But did the children give you a reason?"
"For not alluding to your leaving us? Yes; they said you'd like it better. Do 
you like it better?"
My face had made her rueful. "No, I like it worse!" But after an instant I 
added: "Did they say why I should like it better?"
"No; Master Miles only said, `We must do nothing but what she likes'!"
"I wish indeed he would! And what did Flora say?"
"Miss Flora was too sweet. She said, `Oh, of course, of course!' -and I said 
the same"
I thought for a moment. "You were too sweet too -I can hear you all. But none 
the less, between Miles and me, it's now all out."
"All out?" My companion stared. "But what, Miss?"
"Everything. It doesn't matter. I've made up my mind. I came home, my dear," I 
went on, "for a talk with miss Jessel."
I had by this time formed the habit of having Mrs. Grose literally well in 
hand in advance of my sounding that note; so that even now, as she bravely 
blinked under the signal of my word, I could keep her comparatively fir,. "A 
talk! Do you mean she spoke?"
"It came to that. I found her, on my return, in the schoolroom."
"And what did she say?" I can hear the good woman still, and the candour of 
her stupefaction.
"That she suffers the torments - - !"
It was this, of a truth, that made her, as she filled out my picture, gape. 
"Do you mean," she faltered " -of the lost?"
"of the lost. Of the damned. And that's why, to share them - - " I faltered 
myself with the horror of it.
But my companion, with less imagination, kept me up. "To share them - - ?"
"She wants Flora." Mrs. Grose might, as I gave it to her, have fairly fallen 
away from me had I not been prepared. I still held her there, to show I was. 
"As I've told you, however, it doesn't matter."
"Because you've made up your mind? But to what?"
"To everything."
"And what do you call `everything'?"
"Why, to sending for their uncle."
"oh, miss, in pity do," my friend broke out.
"Ah, but I will, I will! I see it's the only way. What's `out', as I told you, 
with Miles is that if he thinks I'm afraid to -and has ideas of what he gains 
by that -he shall see he's mistaken. Yes, yes; his uncle shall have it here 
from me on the spot (and before the boy himself if necessary) that if I'm to 
be reproached with having done nothing again about more school - - "
"Yes, Miss - - " my companion pressed me.
"Well, there's that awful reason."
There were no clearly so many of these for my poor colleague that she was 
excusable for being vague. "But -a -which?"
"Why, the letter from his old place."
"You'll show it to the master?"
"I ought to have done so on the instant."
"oh, no!" said Mrs. Grose with decision.
"I'll put it before him," I went on inexorably, "that I can't undertake to 
work the question on behalf of a child who has been expelled - - "
"For we've never in the least known what!" Mrs. Grose declared.
"For wickedness. For what else -when he's so clever and beautiful and perfect? 
Is he stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is he ill-natured? He's exquisite 
-so it can be only that; and that would open up the whole thing. After all," I 
said, "it's their uncle's fault. If he left here such people - - !"
"He didn't really in the least know them. The fault's mine." She had turned 
quite pale.
"Well, you shan't suffer," I answered.
"The children shan't!" she emphatically returned.
I was silent awhile; we looked at each other. "Then what am I to tell him?"
"You needn't tell him anything. I'll tell him."
I measured this. "Do you mean you'll write - - ?" Remembering she couldn't, I 
caught myself up. "How do you communicate?"
"I tell the bailiff, He writes."
"And should you like him to write our story?"
My question had a sarcastic force that I had not fully intended, and it made 
her after a moment inconsequently break down. The tears were again in her 
eyes. "Ah, Miss, you write!"
"Well -tonight," I at last returned; and on this we separated.


17

I went so far, in the evening, as to make a beginning. The weather had changed 
back, a great wind was abroad, and beneath the lamp, in my room, with Flora at 
peace beside me, I sat for a long time before a blank sheet of paper and 
listened to the lash of the rain and the batter of the gusts. Finally I went 
out, taking a candle; I crossed the passage and listened a minute at Miles's 
door. What, under my endless obsession, I had been impelled to listen for was 
some betrayal of his not being at rest, and I presently caught one, but not in 
the form I had expected. His voice tinkled out.  "I say, you there -come in." 
It was gaiety in the gloom!
I went in with my light and found him in bed, very wide awake but very much at 
ease. "Well, what are you up to?" he asked with a grace of sociability in 
which it occurred to me that Mrs. Grose, had she been present, might have 
looked in vain for proof that anything was `out'.
I stood over him with my candle. "How did you know I was there?"
"Why, of course, I heard you. Did you fancy you made no noise? You're like a 
troop of cavalry!" he beautifully laughed.
"Then you weren't asleep?"
"Not much! I lie awake and think."
"I had put my candle, designedly, a short way off, and then, as he held out 
his friendly old hand to me, had sat down on the edge of the bed. "What is 
it," I asked, "that you think of?"
"What in the world, my dear, but you?"
"Ah, the pride I take in your appreciation doesn't insist on that! I had so 
rather you slept."
"Well, I think also, you know, of this queer business of ours."
I marked the coolness of his firm little hand. "Of what queer business, Miles?"
"Why, the way you bring me up. And all the rest!"
I fairly held my breath a minute, and even from my glimmering taper there was 
light enough to show how he smiled up at me from his pillow. "What do you mean 
by all the rest?"
"Oh, you know, you know!"
I could say nothing for a minute, though I felt, as I held his hand and our 
eyes continued to meet, that my silence had all the air of admitting his 
charge and that nothing in the whole world of reality was perhaps at that 
moment so fabulous a our actual relation. "Certainly you shall go back to 
school," I said, "if it be that that troubles you. But not to the old place 
-we must find another, a better. How could I know it did trouble you, this 
question, when you never told me so, never spoke of it at all?" His clear, 
listening face, framed in its smooth whiteness, made him for the minute as 
appealing as some wistful patient in a children's hospital; and I would have 
given, as the resemblance came to me, all I possessed on earth really to be 
the nurse or sister of charity who might have helped to cure him. Well, even 
as it was, I perhaps might help! "Do you know you've never said a word to me 
about your school -I mean the old one; never mentioned it in any way?"
He seemed to wonder; he smiled with the same loveliness. But he clearly gained 
time; he waited, he called for guidance. "Haven't I?" It wasn't for me to help 
him -it was for the thing I had met!
Something in his tone and the expression of his face, as I got this from him, 
set my heart aching with such a pang as it had never yet known; so unutterably 
touching was it to see his little brain puzzled and his little resources taxed 
to play, under the spell laid on him, a part of innocence and consistence. 
"no, never -from the hour you came back. You never mentioned to me one of your 
masters, one of your comrades, nor the least little thing that ever happened 
to you at school. Never, little Miles -no, never -have you given me an inkling 
of anything that may have happened there. Therefore you can fancy how much I'm 
in the dark. Until you came out, that way, this morning, you had, since the 
first hour I saw you, scarce even made a reference to anything in your 
previous life. You seemed so perfectly to accept the present." It was 
extraordinary how my absolute conviction of his secret precocity (or whatever 
I might call the poison of an influence that I dared but half to phrase) made 
him, in spite of the faint breath of his inward trouble, appear as accessible 
as an older person -imposed him almost as an intellectual equal. "I thought 
you wanted to go on as you are."
It struck me that at this he just faintly coloured. He gave, at any rate, like 
a convalescent slightly fatigued, a languid shake of his head. "I don't -I 
don't. I want to get away."
"You're tired of Bly?"
"Oh, no, I  like Bly."
"Well, then - - ?"
"Oh, you know what a boy wants!"
I felt that I didn't know so well as Miles, and I took temporary refuge. "You 
want to go to your uncle?"
Again, at this, with his sweet ironic face, he made a movement on the pillow. 
"Ah, you can't get off with that!"
I was silent a little, and it was I, now, I think, who changed colour. "My 
dear, I don't want to get off!"
"You can't, even if you do. You can't, you can't!" -he lay beautifully 
staring. "My uncle must come down, and you must completely settle things."
"If we do," I returned with some spirit, "you may be sure it will be to take 
you quite away."
"Well, don't you understand that that's exactly what I'm working for? You'll 
have to tell him -about the way you've let it all drop: you'll have to tell 
him a tremendous lot!"
The exultation with which he uttered this helped me somehow, for the instant, 
to meet him rather more. "And how much will you, Miles, have to tell him? 
There are things he'll ask you!"
He turned it over. "Very likely. But what things?"
"The things you've never told me. To make up his mind what to do with you. He 
can't send you back - - "
"Oh, I don't want to go back!" he broke in. "I want a new field."
He said it with admirable serenity, with positive umimpeachable gaiety; and 
doubtless it was that very note that most evoked for me the poignancy, the 
unnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappearance at the end of three 
months with all this bravado and still more dishonour. It overwhelmed me now 
that I should never be able to bear that, and it made me let myself go. I 
threw myself upon him and in the tenderness of my pity I embraced him. "Dear 
little Miles, dear little Miles - - !"
My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, simply taking it with 
indulgent good-humour. "Well, old lady?"
"Is there nothing -nothing at all that you want to tell me?"
He turned off a little, facing round toward the wall and holding up his hand 
to look at as one had seen sick children look. "I've told you this morning."
Oh, I was sorry for him! "That you just want me not to worry you?"
He looked round at me know, as if in recognition of my understanding him; then 
ever so gently, "To let me alone," he replied.
There was even a singular little dignity in it, something that made me release 
him, yet, when I had slowly risen, linger beside him. God knows I never wished 
to harass him, but I felt that merely, at this, to turn my back on him was to 
abandon or, to put it more truly, to lose him. "I've just begun a letter to 
your uncle," I said.
"Well, then, finish it!"
I waited a minute. "What happened before?"
He gazed up at me again. "Before what?"
"Before you came back. And before you went away."
For some time he was silent, but he continued to meet my eyes. "What happened?"
It made me, the sound of the words, in which it seemed to me that I caught for 
the very first time a small faint quiver of consenting consciousness -it made 
me drop on my knees beside the bed and seize once more the chance of 
Possessing him. "Dear little Miles, dear little Miles, if you knew how I want 
to help you! It's only that, it's nothing but that, and I's rather die than 
give you a pain or do you a wrong -I'd rather die than hurt a hair of you. 
Dear little Miles" -oh, I brought it out now even if I should go too far -"I 
just want you to help me to save you!" But I knew in a moment after this that 
I had gone too far. The answer to my appeal was instantaneous, but it came in 
the form of an extraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozen air and a shake 
of the room as great as if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. The 
boy gave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of sound, 
might have seemed, indistinctly, though I was so close to him, a note either 
of jubilation or of terror. I jumped to my feet again and was conscious of 
darkness. So for a moment we remained, while I stared about me and saw that 
the drawn curtains were unstirred and the window tight. "Why, the candle's 
out!" I then cried.
"It was I who blew it, dear!" said Miles.


18

The next day, after lessons, Mrs. Grose found a moment to say to me quietly: 
"Have you written, Miss?"
"Yes -I've written." But I didn't add -for the hour -that my letter, sealed 
and directed, was still in my pocket. There would be time enough to send it 
before the messenger should go to the village. Meanwhile there had been on the 
part of my pupils no more brilliant, more exemplary morning. It was exactly as 
if they had both had at heart to gloss over any recent little friction. They 
performed the dizziest feats of arithmetic, soaring quite out of my feeble 
range, and perpetrated, in higher spirits than ever, geographical and 
historical jokes. In was conspicuous of course in Miles in particular that he 
appeared to wish to show how easily he could let me down. This child, to my 
memory, really lives in a setting of beauty and misery that no words can 
translate; there was a distinction all his own in every impulse he revealed; 
never was a small natural creature, to the uninformed eye all frankness and 
freedom, a more ingenious, a more extraordinary little gentleman. I had 
perpetually to guard against the wonder of contemplation into which my 
initiated view betrayed me; the check the irrelevant gaze and discouraged sigh 
in which I constantly both attacked and renounced the enigma of what such a 
little gentleman could have done that deserved a penalty. Say that, by the 
dark prodigy I knew, the imagination of all evil had been opened up to him: 
all the justice within me ached for the proof that it could ever have flowered 
into an act.
He had never, at any rate, been such a little gentleman as when, after our 
early dinner on this dreadful day, he came round to me and asked if I 
shouldn't like him, for half an hour, to play to me. David playing to Saul 
could never have shown a finer sense of the occasion. It was literally a 
charming exhibition of tact, of magnanimity, and quite tantamount to his 
saying outright: "The true knights we love to read about never push an 
advantage too far. I know what you mean now: you mean that -to be let alone 
yourself and not followed up -you'll cease to worry and spy upon me, won't 
keep me so close to you, will let me go and come. Well, I `come', you see -but 
I don't go! There'll be plenty of time for that. I do really delight in your 
society, and I only want to show you that I contended for a principle." It may 
be imagined whether I resisted this appeal or failed to accompany him again, 
hand in hand, to the schoolroom. He sat down at the old piano and played as he 
had never played, and if there are those who think he had better have been 
kicking a football I can only say that I wholly agree with them. For at the 
end of a time that under his influence I had quite ceased to measure I started 
up with a strange sense of having literally slept at my post. It was after 
luncheon, and by the schoolroom fire, and yet I hadn't really in the least 
slept: I had only done something much worse -I had forgotten. Where, all this 
time, was Flora? When I put the question to Miles he played on a minute before 
answering, and then could only say: "Why, my dear, how do I know?" -breaking 
moreover into a happy laugh which, immediately after, as if it were a vocal 
accompaniment, he prolonged into incoherent, extravagant song.
I went straight to my room, but his sister was not there; then, before going 
downstairs, I looked into several others. As she was nowhere about she would 
surely be with Mrs. Grose, whom, in the comfort of that theory, I accordingly 
proceeded in quest of. I found her where I had found her the evening before, 
but she met my quick challenge with blank, scared ignorance. She had only 
supposed that, after the repast, I had carried off both the children; as to 
which she was quite in her right, for it was the very first time I had allowed 
the little girl out of my sight without some special provision. Of course now 
indeed she might be with the maids, so that the immediate thing was to look 
for her without an air of alarm. This we promptly arranged between us; but 
when, ten minutes later and in pursuance of our arrangement, we met in the 
hall, it was only to report on either side that after guarded inquiries we had 
altogether failed to trace her. For a minute there, apart from observation, we 
exchanged mute alarms, and I could feel with what high interest my friend 
returned me all those I had from the first given her.
"She'll be above," she presently said -"in one of the rooms you haven't 
searched."
"No; she's at a distance." I had made up my mind. "She has gone out."
Mrs. Grose stared. "Without a hat?"
I naturally also looked volumes. "Isn't that woman always without one?"
"She's with her?"
"She with her!" I declared. "We must find them."
My hand was on my friend's arm, but she failed for the moment, confronted with 
such an account of the matter, to respond to my pressure. She communed, on the 
contrary, on the spot, with her uneasiness. "And where's Master Miles?"
"Oh, he's with Quint. They're in the schoolroom."
"Lord, Miss!" My view, I was myself aware -and therefore I suppose my tone 
-had never yet reached so calm an assurance.
"The trick's played," I went on; "they've successfully worked their plan. He 
found the most divine little way to keep me quiet while she went off."
" `Divine'?" Mrs. Grose bewilderedly echoed.
"Infernal, then!" I almost cheerfully rejoined. "He has provided for himself 
as well. But come!"
She had helplessly gloomed at the upper regions. "You leave him - - ?"
"So long with Quint? Yes -I don't mind that now."
She always ended, at these moments, by getting possession of my hand, and in 
this manner she could at present still stay me. But after gasping an instant 
at my sudden resignation, "Because of your letter?" she eagerly brought out.
I quickly, by way of answer, felt for my letter, drew it forth, held it up, 
and then, freeing myself, went and laid it on the great hall-table. "Luke will 
take it," I said as I came back. I reached the house-door and opened it; I was 
already on the steps.
My companion still demurred: the storm of the night and the early morning had 
dropped, but the afternoon was damp and grey. I came down to the drive while 
she stood in the doorway. "You go with nothing on?"
"What do I care when the child has nothing? I can't wait to dress," I cried, 
"and if you must do so, I leave you. Try meanwhile, yourself, upstairs."
"With them?" Oh, on this, the poor woman promptly joined me!


19

We went straight to the lake, as it was called at Bly, and I dare say rightly 
called, though I reflect that it may in fact have been a sheet of water less 
remarkable than it appeared to my untravelled eyes. My acquaintance with 
sheets of water was small, and the pool of Bly, at all events on the few 
occasions of my consenting, under the protection of my pupils, to affront its 
surface in the old flat-bottomed boat moored there for our use, had impressed 
me both with its extent and its agitation. The usual place of embarkation was 
half a mile from the house, but I had an intimate conviction that, wherever 
Flora might be, she was not near home. She had not given me the slip for any 
small adventure, and, since the day of the very great one that I had shared 
with her by the pond, I had been aware, in our walks, of the quarter to which 
she most inclined. This was why I had now given to Mrs. Grose's steps so 
marked a direction -a direction making her, when she perceived it, oppose a 
resistance that showed me she was freshly mystified. "You're going to the 
water, Miss? -you think she's in - - ?"
"She may be, though the depth is, I believe, nowhere very great. But what I 
judge most likely is that she's on the spot from which, the other day, we saw 
together what I told you."
"When she pretended not to see - - ?"
"With that astounding self-possession! I've always been sure she wanted to go 
back alone. And now her brother has managed it for her."
Mrs. Grose still stood where she had stopped. "You suppose they really talk of 
them?"
I could meet this with confidence! "They say things that, if we heard them, 
would simply appal us."
"And if she is there - - ?"
"Yes?"
"Then Miss Jessel is?"
"Beyond a doubt. You shall see."
"Oh, thank you!" my friend cried, planted so firm that, taking it in, I went 
straight on without her. By the time I reached the pool, however, she was 
close behind me, and I knew that, whatever, to her apprehension, might befall 
me, the exposure of my society struck her at her least danger. She exhaled a 
moan of relief as we at last came in sight of the greater part of the water 
without a sight of the child. There was no trace of Flora on that nearer side 
of the bank where my observation of her had been most startling, and none on 
the opposite edge, where, save for a margin of some twenty yards, a thick 
copse came down to the water. This expanse, oblong in shape, was so narrow 
compared to its length that, with its ends out of view, it might have been 
taken for a scant river. We looked at the empty stretch, and then I felt the 
suggestion of my friend's eyes. I knew what she meant and I replied with a 
negative headshake.
"No, no; wait! She has taken the boat."
My companion stared at the vacant mooring-place and then again across the 
lake. "Then where is it?"
"Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs. She had used it to go over, and 
then has managed to hide it."
"All alone -that child?"
"She's not alone, and at such times she's not a child: she's an old, old 
woman." I scanned all the visible shore while Mrs. Grose took again, into the 
queer element I offered her, one of her plunges of submission; then I pointed 
out that the boat might perfectly be in a small refuge formed by one of the 
recesses of the pool, an indentation masked, for the hither side, by a 
projection of the bank and by a clump of trees growing close to the water.
"But if the boat's there, where on earth's she?" my colleague anxiously asked.
"That's exactly what we must learn." And I started to walk further.
"By going all the way round?"
"Certainly, far as it is. it will take us but ten minutes, but it's far enough 
to have made the child prefer not to walk. She went straight over."
"Laws!" cried my friend again; the chain of my logic was ever too much for 
her. It dragged her at my heels even now, and when we had got halfway round -a 
devious, tiresome process, on ground much broken and by a path choked with 
overgrowth -I paused to give her breath. I sustained her with a grateful arm, 
assuring her that she might hugely help me; and this started us afresh, so 
that in the course of but few minutes more we reached a point from which we 
found the boat to be where I had supposed it. It had been intentionally left 
as much as possible out of sight and was tied to one of the stakes of a fence 
that came, just there, down to the brink and that had been an assistance to 
disembarking. I recognised, as I looked at the pair of short thick oars, quite 
safely drawn up, the prodigious character of the feat for a little girl; but I 
had lived, by this time, too long among wonders and had panted to too many 
livelier measures. There was a gate in the fence, through which we passed, and 
that brought us, after a trifling interval, more into the open. Then, "There 
she is!" we both exclaimed at once.
Flora, a short way off, stood before us on the grass and smiled as if her 
performance was now complete. The next thing she did, however, was to stoop 
straight down and pluck -quite as if it were all she was there for -a big, 
ugly spray of withered fern. I instantly became sure she had just come out of 
the copse. She waited for us, not herself taking a step, and I was conscious 
of the rare solemnity with which we presently approached her. She smiled and 
smiled, and we met; but it was all done in a silence by this time flagrantly 
ominous. Mrs. Grose was the first to break the spell: she threw herself on her 
knees and, drawing the child to her breast, clasped in a long embrace the 
little tender, yielding body. While this dumb convulsion lasted I could only 
watch -which I did the more intently when I saw Flora's face peep at me over 
our companion's shoulder. It was serious now -the flicker had left it; but it 
strengthened the pang with which I at that moment envied Mrs. Grose the 
simplicity of her relation. Still, all this while, nothing more passed between 
us save that Flora had let her foolish fern again drop to the ground. What she 
and I had virtually said to each other was that pretexts were useless now. 
When Mrs. Grose finally got up she kept the child's hand, so that the two were 
still before me; and the singular reticence of our communion was even more 
marked in the frank look she launched me. "I'll be hanged," it said, "if I'll 
speak!"
It was Flora who, gazing all over me in candid wonder, was the first. She was 
struck with our bareheaded aspect. "Why, where are your things?"
"Where yours are, my dear!" I promptly returned.
She had already got back her gaiety, and appeared to take this as an answer 
quite sufficient. "And where's Miles?" she went on.
There was something in the small valour of it that quite finished me: these 
three words from her were, in a flash like the glitter of a drawn blade, the 
jostle of the cup that my hand, for weeks and weeks, had held high and full to 
the brim and that now, even before speaking, I felt overflow in a deluge. 
"I'll tell you if you'll tell me - - " I heard myself say, then heard the 
tremor in which it broke.
"Well, what?"
Mrs. Grose's suspense blazed at me, but it was too late now, and I brought the 
thing out handsomely. "Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel?"


20

Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was upon us. Much as I 
had made of the fact that this name had never once, between us, been sounded, 
the quick, smitten glare with which the child's face now received it fairly 
likened my breach of the silence to the smash of a pane of glass. It added to 
the interposing cry, as if to stay the blow, that Mrs. Grose at the same 
instant uttered over my violence -the shriek of a creature scared, or rather 
wounded, which, in turn, within a few seconds, was completed by a gasp of my 
own. I seized my colleague's arm. "She's there, she's there!"
Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had stood the 
other time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feeling now produced in 
me, my thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. She was there, and I was 
justified; she was there, and I was neither cruel nor mad. She was there for 
poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there most for Flora; and no moment of my 
monstrous time was perhaps so extraordinary as that in which I consciously 
threw out to her -with the sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she 
would catch and understand it -an inarticulate message of gratitude. She rose 
erect on the spot my friend and I had lately quitted, and there was not, in 
all the long reach of her desire, an inch of her evil that fell short. This 
first vividness of vision and emotion were things of a few seconds, during 
which Mrs. Grose's dazed blink across to where I pointed struck me as a 
sovereign sign that she too at last saw, just as it carried my own eyes 
precipitately to the child. The revelation then of the manner in which Flora 
was affected startled me, in truth, far more than it would have done to find 
her also merely agitated, for direct dismay was of course not what I had 
expected. Prepared and on her guard as our pursuit had actually made her, she 
would repress every betrayal; and I was therefore shaken, on the spot, by my 
first glimpse of the particular one for which I had not allowed. To see her, 
without a convulsion of her small pink face, not even feign to glance in the 
direction of the prodigy I announced, but only, instead of that, turn at me an 
expression of hard, still gravity, an expression absolutely new and 
unprecedented and that appeared to read and accuse and judge me -this was a 
stroke that somehow converted the little girl herself into the very presence 
that could make me quail. I quailed even though my certitude that she 
thoroughly saw was never greater than at that instant, and in the immediate 
need to defend myself I called it passionately to witness. "She's there, you 
little unhappy thing -there, there, there, and you see her as well as you see 
me!" I had said shortly before to Mrs. Grose that she was not at these times a 
child, but an old, old woman, and that description of her could not have been 
more strikingly confirmed than in the way in which, for all answer to this, 
she simply showed me, without a concession, an admission, of her eyes, a 
countenance of deeper and deeper, of indeed suddenly quite fixed, reprobation. 
I was by this time -if I can put the whole thing at all together -more 
appalled at what I may properly call her manner than at anything else, though 
it was simultaneously with this that I became aware of having Mrs. Grose also, 
and very formidably, to reckon with. My elder companion, the next moment, at 
any rate, blotted out everything but her own flushed face and her loud, 
shocked protest, a burst of high disapproval. "What a dreadful turn, to be 
sure, Miss! Where on earth do you see anything?"
I could only grasp her more quickly yet, for even while she spoke the hideous 
plain presence stood undimmed and undaunted. It had already lasted a minute, 
and it lasted while I continued, seizing my colleague, quite thrusting her at 
it and presenting her to it, to insist with my pointing hand. "You don't see 
her exactly as we see? -you mean to say you don't now -now? She's as big as a 
blazing fire! Only look, dearest woman, look - - !" She looked, even as I did, 
and gave me, with her deep groan of negation, repulsion, compassion -the 
mixture with her pity of her relief at her exemption -a sense, touching to me 
even then, that she would have backed me up if she could. I might well have 
needed that, for with this hard blow of the proof that her eyes were 
hopelessly sealed I felt my own situation horribly crumble, I felt -I saw -my 
livid predecessor press, from her position, on my defeat, and I was conscious, 
more than all, of what I should have from this instant to deal with in the 
astounding little attitude of Flora. Into this attitude Mrs. Grose immediately 
and violently entered, breaking, even while there pierced through my sense of 
ruin a prodigious triumph, into breathless reassurance.
"She isn't there, little lady, and nobody's there -and you never see nothing, 
my sweet! How can poor Miss Jessel? when poor Miss Jessel's dead and buried? 
We know, don't we, love?" -and she appealed, blundering in, to the child. 
"It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke -and we'll go home as fast as 
we can!"
Our companion, on this, had responded with a strange, quick primness of 
propriety, and they were again, with Mrs. Grose on her feet, united, as it 
were, in pained opposition to me. Flora continued to fix me with her small 
mask of reprobation, and even at that minute I prayed God to forgive me for 
seeming to see that, as she stood there holding tight to our friend's dress, 
her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly failed, had quite vanished. I've 
said it already -she was literally, she was hideously, hard; she had turned 
common and almost ugly. "I don't know what you mean. I see nobody. I see 
nothing. I never have. I think you're cruel. I don't like you!" Then, after 
this deliverance, which might have been that of a vulgarly pert little girl in 
the street, she hugged Mrs. Grose more closely and buried in her skirts the 
dreadful little face. In this position she produced an almost furious wail. 
"Take me away, take me away -oh, take me away from her!"
"From me?" I panted.
"From you -from you!" she cried.
Even Mrs. Grose looked across at me dismayed, while I had nothing to do but 
communicate again with the figure that, on the opposite bank, without a 
movement, as rigidly still as if catching, beyond the interval, our voices, 
was a vividly there for my disaster as it was not there for my service. The 
wretched child had spoken exactly as if she had got from some outside source 
each of her stabbing little words, and I could therefore, in the full despair 
of all that I had to accept, but sadly shake my head at he. "If I had ever 
doubted, all my doubt would at present have gone. I've been living with the 
miserable truth, and now it has only too much closed around me. Of course I've 
lost you: I've interfered, and you've seen -under her dictation" -with which I 
faced, over the pool again, our infernal witness -"the easy and perfect way to 
meet it. I've done my best, but I've lost you. Good-bye." For Mrs. Grose I had 
an imperative, an almost frantic yGo, go!" before which, in infinite distress, 
but mutely possessed of the little girl and clearly convinced, in spite of her 
blindness, that something awful had occurred and some collapse engulfed us, 
she retreated, by the way we had come, as fast as she could move.
Of what first happened when I was left alone I had no subsequent memory. I 
only knew that at the end of, I suppose, a quarter of an hour, an odorous 
dampness and roughness, chilling and piercing my trouble, had made me 
understand that I must have thrown myself, on my face, on the ground and given 
way to a wildness of grief. I must have lain there long and cried and wailed, 
for hen I raised my head the day was almost done. I got up and looked a 
moment, through the twilight, at the grey pool and its blank, haunted edge, 
and then I took, back to my house, my dreary and difficult course. When I 
reached the gate in the fence the boat, to my surprise, was gone, so that I 
had a fresh reflection to make on Flora's extraordinary command of the 
situation. She passed that night, by the most tacit and, I should add, were 
not the word so grotesque a false note, the happiest of arrangements, with 
Mrs. Grose. I saw neither of them on my return, but, on the other hand I saw, 
as by an ambiguous compensation, a great deal of Miles. I saw -I can use no 
other phrase -so much of him that it was as if it were more than it had ever 
been. No evening I had passed at Bly had the portentous quality of this one; 
in spite of which -and in spite also of the deeper depths of consternation 
that had opened beneath my feet -there was literally, in the ebbing actual, an 
extraordinarily sweet sadness. On reaching the house I had never so much as 
looked for the boy; I had simply gone straight to my room to change what I was 
wearing and to take in, at a glance, much material testimony to Flora's 
rupture. Her little belongings had all been removed. When later, by the 
schoolroom fire, I was served with tea by the usual maid, I indulged, on the 
article of my other pupil, in no inquiry whatever. He had his freedom now -he 
might have it to the end! Well, he did have it; and it consisted -in part at 
least -of his coming in at about eight o'clock and sitting down with me in 
silence. On the removal of the tea-things I had blown out the candles and 
drawn my chair closer: I was conscious of a mortal coldness and felt as if I 
should never again be warm. So, when he appeared, I was sitting in the glow 
with my thoughts. He paused a moment by the door as if to look at me; then -as 
if to share them -came to the other side of the hearth and sank into a chair. 
We sat there in absolute stillness; yet he wanted, I felt, to be with me.


21

Before a new day, in my room, had fully broken, my eyes opened to Mrs. Grose, 
who had come to my bedside with worse news. Flora was so markedly feverish 
that an illness was perhaps at hand; she had passed a night of extreme unrest, 
a night agitated above all by fears that had for their subject not in the 
least her former but wholly her present governess. It was not against the 
possible re-entrance of Miss Jessel on the scene that she protested -it was 
conspicuously and passionately against mine. I was at once on my feet, and 
with an immense deal to ask; the more that my friend had discernibly now 
girded her loins to meet me afresh. This I felt as soon as I had put to her 
the question of her sense of the child's sincerity as against my own. "She 
persists in denying to you that she saw, or has ever seen, anything?"
My visitor's trouble truly was great. "Ah, Miss, it isn't a matter on which I 
can push her. Yet it isn't either, I must say, as if I much needed to. It has 
made her, every inch of her, quite old."
"Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world like some 
high little personage, the imputation on her truthfulness and, as it were, her 
respectability. `Miss Jessel indeed -she!' Ah, she's `respectable', the chit! 
The impression she gave me there yesterday was, I assure you, the very 
strangest of all; it was quite beyond any of the others. I did put my foot in 
it! She'll never speak to me again."
Hideous and obscure as it all was, it held Mrs. Grose briefly silent; then she 
granted my point with a frankness which, I made sure, had more behind it. "I 
think indeed, Miss, she never will. She do have a grand manner about it!"
"And that manner" -I summed it up -"is practically what's the matter with her 
now!"
Oh, that manner, I could see in my visitor's face, and not a little else 
besides! "She asks every three minutes if I think you're coming in."
"I see -I see." I too, on my side, had so much more than worked it out. "Has 
she said to you since yesterday -except to repudiate her familiarity with 
anything so dreadful -a single other word about Miss Jessel?"
"Not one, Miss. And of course you know," my friend added, "I took it from her, 
by the lake, that, just then and there at least, there was nobody."
"Rather! And, naturally, you take it from her still."
"I don't contradict her. What else can I do?"
"Nothing in the world! You've the cleverest little person to deal with. 
They've made them -their two friends, I mean -still cleverer even than nature 
did; for it was wondrous material to play on! Flora had now her grievance, and 
she'll work it to the end."
"Yes, Miss; but to what end?"
"Why, that of dealing with me to her uncle. She'll make me out to him the 
lowest creature - - !"
I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs. Grose's face; she looked for a 
minute as if she sharply saw them together. "And him who thinks so well of you!"
"He has an odd way -it comes over me now," I laughed, " -of proving it! But 
that doesn't matter. What Flora wants, of course, is to get rid of me."
My companion bravely concurred. "Never again to so much as look at you."
"So that what you've come to me now for," I asked, "is to speed me on my way?" 
Before she had time to reply, however, I had her in check. "I've a better idea 
-the result of my reflections. My going would seem the right thing, and on 
Sunday I was terribly near it. Yet that won't do. It's you who must go. You 
must take Flora."
My visitor, at this, did speculate. "But where in the world - - ?"
"Away from here. Away rom them. Away, even most of all, from me. Straight to 
her uncle."
"Only to tell on you - - ?"
"No, not `only'! To leave me, in addition, with my remedy."
She was still vague. "And what is your remedy?"
"Your loyalty, to begin with. And then Miles's."
She looked at me hard. "Do you think he - - ?"
"Won't if he has the chance, turn on me? Yes, I venture still to think it. At 
all events, I want to try. Get off with his sister as soon as possible and 
leave me with him alone." I was amazed, myself, at the spirit I had still in 
reserve, and therefore perhaps a trifle the more disconcerted at the way in 
which, in spite of this fine example of it, she hesitated. "There's one thing, 
of course," I went on:: "they mustn't, before she goes, see each other for 
three seconds." Then it came over me that, in spite of Flora's presumable 
sequestration from the instant of her return from the pool, it might already 
be too late. "Do you mean," I anxiously asked, "that they have met?"
At this she quite flushed. "Ah, Miss, I'm not such a fool as that! If I've 
been obliged to leave her three or four times, it has been each time with one 
of the maids, and at present, though she's alone, she's locked in safe. And 
yet -and yet!" There were too many things.
"And yet what?"
"Well, are you so sure of the little gentleman?"
"I'm not sure of anything but you. But I have, since last evening, a new hope. 
I think he wants to give me an opening. I do believe that -poor little 
exquisite wretch! -he wants to speak. Last evening, in the firelight and the 
silence, he sat with me for two hours as if it were just coming."
Mrs. Grose looked hard, through the window, at the grey, gathering day. "And 
did it come?"
"No, though I waited and waited, I confess it didn't, and it was without a 
breach of the silence or so much as a faint allusion to his sister's condition 
and absence that we at last kissed for good-night. All the same," I continued, 
"I can't, if her uncle sees her, consent to his seeing her brother without my 
having given the boy -and most of all because things have got so bad -a little 
more time."
My friend appeared on this ground more reluctant than I could quite 
understand. "What do you mean by more time?"
"Well, a day or two -really to bring it out. He'll then be on my side -of 
which you see the importance. If nothing comes, I shall only fail, and you 
will, at the worst, have helped me by doing, on your arrival in town, whatever 
you may have found possible." So I put it before her, but she continued for a 
little so inscrutably embarrassed that I came again to her aid. "Unless, 
indeed," I wound up, "you really want not to go."
I could see it, in her face, at last clear itself; she put out her hand to me 
as a pledge. "I'll go -I'll go. I'll go this morning."
I wanted to be very just. "If you should wish still to wait, I would engage 
she shouldn't see me."
"No, no: it's the place itself. She must leave it." She held me a moment with 
heavy eyes, then brought out the rest. "Your idea's the right one. I myself, 
Miss - - "
"Well?"
"I can't stay."
The look she gave me with it made me jump at possibilities. "You mean that, 
since yesterday, you have seen - - ?"
She shook her head with dignity. "I've heard - - !"
"Heard?"
"From that child -horrors! There!" she sighed with tragic relief. "On my 
honour, Miss, she says things - - !" But at this evocation she broke down; she 
dropped, with a sudden sob, upon my sofa and, as I had seen her do before, 
gave way to all the grief of it.
It was quite in another manner that I, for my part, let myself go. "Oh, thank 
God!"
She sprang up again at this, drying her eyes with a groan. "Thank God?"
"It so justifies me!"
"It does that, Miss!"
I couldn't have desired more emphasis, but I just hesitated. "She's so 
horrible?"
I saw my colleague scarce knew how to put it. "Really shocking."
"And about me?"
"About you, Miss -since you must have it. It's beyond everything, for a young 
lady; and I can't think wherever she must have picked up - - "
"The appalling language she applied to me? I can, then!" I broke in with a 
laugh that was doubtless significant enough.
It only, in truth, left my friend still more grave. "Well, perhaps I ought 
also -since I've heard some of it before! Yet I can't bear it," the poor woman 
went on while, with the same movement, she glanced, on my dressing-table, at 
the face of my watch. "But I must go back."
I kept her, however. "Ah, if you can't bear it - - !"
"How can I stop with he, you mean? Why, just for that: to get her away. Far 
from this," she pursued, "far from them - - "
"She may be different? she may be free?" I seized her almost with joy. "Then, 
in spite of yesterday, you believe - - "
"In such doings?" Her simple description of them required, in the light of her 
expression, to be carried no further, and she gave me the whole thing as she 
had never done. "I believe."
Yes, it was a joy, and we were still shoulder to shoulder: if I might continue 
sure of that I should care but little what else happened. My support in the 
presence of disaster would be the same as it had been in my early need of 
confidence, and if my friend would answer for my honesty, I would answer for 
all the rest. On the point of taking leave of her, none the less, I was to 
some extent embarrassed. "There's one thing of course -it occurs to me -to 
remember. My letter, giving the alarm, will have reached town before you."
I now perceived still more how she had been beating about the bush and how 
weary at last it had made her. "Your letter won't have got there. Your letter 
never went."
"What then became of it?"
"Goodness knows! Master Miles - - "
"Do you mean he took it?" I gasped.
She hung fire, but she overcame her reluctance. "I mean that I saw yesterday, 
when I came back with Miss Flora, that it wasn't where you had put it. Later 
in the evening I had the chance to question Luke, and he declared that he had 
neither noticed nor touched it." We could only exchange, on this, one of our 
deeper mutual soundings, and it was Mrs. Grose who first brought up the plumb 
with an almost elate "You see!"
"Yes, I see that if Miles took it instead he probably will have read it and 
destroyed it."
"And don't you see anything else?"
I face her a moment with a sad smile. "It strikes me that by this time your 
eyes are open even wider than mine."
They proved to be so indeed, but she could still almost blush to show it. "I 
make out now what he must have done at school." And she gave, in her simple 
sharpness, an almost droll disillusioned nod. "He stole!"
I turned it over -I tried to be more judicial. "Well -perhaps."
She looked as if she found me unexpectedly calm. "He stole letters!"
She couldn't know my reasons for a calmness after all pretty shallow; so I 
showed them off as I might. "I hope then it was to more purpose than in this 
case! The note, at any rate, that I put on the table yesterday," I pursued, 
"will have given him so scant an advantage -for it contained only the bare 
demand for an interview -that he is already much ashamed of having gone so far 
for so little, and that what he had on his mind last evening was precisely the 
need of confession." I seemed to myself, for the instant, to have mastered it, 
to see all. "Leave us, leave us" -I was already, at the door, hurrying her 
off. "I'll get it out of him. He'll meet me -he'll confess. If he confesses, 
he's saved. And if he's saved - - "
"Then you are?" The dear woman kissed me on this, and I took her farewell. 
"I'll save you without him!" she cried as she went.


22

Yet it was when she had got off -and I missed her on the spot -that the great 
pinch really came. If I had counted on what it would give me to find myself 
alone with Miles, I quickly recognised that it would give me at least a 
measure. No hour of my stay in fact was so assailed with apprehensions as that 
of my coming down to learn that the carriage carrying Mrs. Grose and my 
younger pupil had already rolled out of the gates. Now I was, I said to 
myself, face to face with the elements, and for much of the rest of the day, 
while I fought my weakness, I could consider that I had been supremely rash. 
It was a tighter place still than I had yet turned round in; all the more 
that, for the first time, I could see in the aspect of others a confused 
reflection of the crisis. What had naturally caused them all to stare; there 
was too little of the explained, throw out whatever we might, in the 
suddenness of my colleague's act. The maids and the men looked blank; the 
effect of which on my nerves was an aggravation until I saw the necessity of 
making it a positive aid. It was in short by just clutching the helm that I 
avoided total wreck; and I dare say that, to bear up at all, I became that 
morning very grand and very dry. I welcomed the consciousness that I was 
charged with much to do, and I caused it to be known as well that, left thus 
to myself, I was quite remarkably firm. I wandered with that manner, for the 
next hour or two, all over the place and looked, I have no doubt, as if I were 
ready for any onset. So, for the benefit of whom it might concern, I paraded 
with a sick heart.
The person it appeared least to concern proved to be, till dinner, little 
Miles himself. My perambulations has given me meanwhile, no glimpse of him, 
but they had tended to make more public the change taking place in our 
relation as a consequence of his having at the piano, the day before, kept me, 
in Flora's interest, so beguiled and befooled. The stamp of publicity had of 
course been fully given by her confinement and departure, and the change 
itself was now ushered in by our non-observance of the regular custom of the 
schoolroom, He had already disappeared when, on my way down, I pushed open his 
door, and I learned below that he had breakfasted -in the presence of a couple 
of the maids -with Mrs. Grose and his sister. He had then gone out, as he 
said, for a stroll; than which nothing, I reflected, could better have 
expressed his frank view of the abrupt transformation of my office. What he 
would now permit this office to consist of was yet to be settled: there was a 
queer relief, at all events -I mean for myself in especial -in the 
renouncement of one pretension. If so much had sprung to the surface, I scarce 
put it too strongly in saying that what had perhaps sprung highest was the 
absurdity of our prolonging the fiction that I had anything more to teach him. 
It sufficiently stuck out that, by tacit little tricks in which even more than 
myself he carried out the care for my dignity, I had had to appeal to him to 
let me off straining to meet him on the ground of his true capacity. He had at 
any rate his freedom now; I was never to touch it again; as I had amply shown, 
moreover, when, on his joining me in the schoolroom the previous night, I had 
uttered, on the subject of the interval just concluded, neither challenge nor 
hint. I had too much, from this moment, my other ideas. Yet when he at last 
arrived the difficulty of applying them, the accumulations of my problem, were 
brought straight home to me by the beautiful little presence on which what had 
occurred had as yet, for the eye, dropped neither stain nor shadow.
To mark, for the house, the high state I cultivated I decreed that my meals 
with the boy should be served, as we called it, downstairs; so that I had been 
awaiting him in the ponderous pomp of the room outside of the window of which 
I had had from Mrs. Grose, that first scared Sunday, my flash of something it 
would scarce have done to call light. Here at present I felt afresh -for I had 
felt it again and again -how my equilibrium depended on the success of my 
rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that 
what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on 
at all by taking `nature' into my confidence and my account, by treating my 
monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, 
but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of 
ordinary human virtue. No attempt, none the less, could well require more tact 
than just this attempt to supply, one's self, all the nature. How could I put 
even a little of that article into a suppression of reference to what had 
occurred? How, on the other hand, could I make a reference without a new 
plunge into the hideous obscure? Well, a sort of answer, after a time, had 
come to me, and it was so far confirmed as that I was met, incontestably, by 
the quickened vision of what was rare in my little companion. It was indeed as 
if he had found even now -as he had so often found at lessons -still some 
other delicate way to ease me off. Wasn't there light in the fact which, as we 
shared our solicitude, broke out with a specious glitter it had never yet 
quite worn? -the fact that (opportunity aiding, precious opportunity which had 
now come) it would be preposterous, with a child so endowed, to forgo the help 
one might wrest from absolute intelligence? What had his intelligence been 
given him for but to save him? Mightn't one, to reach his mind, risk the 
stretch of an angular arm over his character? It was as if, when we were face 
to face in the dining-room, he had literally shown me the way. The roast 
mutton was on the table, and I had dispensed with attendance. Miles, before he 
sat down, stood a moment with his hands in his pockets and looked at the 
joint, on which he seemed on the point of passing some humorous judgement. But 
what he presently produced was: "I say, my dear, is she really very awfully 
ill?"
"Little Flora? Not so bad but that she'll presently be better. London will set 
her up. Bly had ceased to agree with her. Come here and take your mutton."
He alertly obeyed me, carried the plate carefully to his seat, and, when he 
was established, went on. "Did Bly disagree with her so terribly suddenly?"
"Not so suddenly as you might think. One had seen it coming on."
"Then why didn't you get her off before?"
"Before what?"
"Before she became too ill to travel"
I found myself prompt. "She's not too ill to travel: she only might have 
become so if she had stayed. This was just the moment to seize. The journey 
will dissipate the influence" -oh, I was grand! -"and carry it off."
"I see, I see" -Miles, for that matter, was grand too. He settled to his 
repast with the charming little `table manner' that, from the day of his 
arrival, had relieved me of all grossness of admonition. Whatever he had been 
driven from school for, it was not for ugly feeding. He was irreproachable, as 
always, today; but he was unmistakably more conscious. He was discernibly 
trying to take for granted more things than he found, without assistance, 
quite easy; and he dropped into peaceful silence while he felt his situation. 
Our meal was of the briefest -mine a vain pretence, and I had the things 
immediately removed. While this was done Miles stood again with his hands in 
his little pockets and his back to me -stood and looked out of the wide window 
through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled me up. We continued 
silent while that maid was with us -as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, 
as some young couple who, on their wedding-journey, at the inn, feel shy in 
the presence of the waiter. He turned round only when the waiter had left us. 
"Well -so we're alone!"


23

"Oh, more or less." I fancy my smile was pale. "Not absolutely. We shouldn't 
like that!" I went on.
"No -I suppose we shouldn't. Of course, we've the others."
"We've the others -we've, indeed, the others," I concurred.
"Yet even though we have them," he returned, still with his hands in his 
pockets and planted there in front of me, "they don't much count, do they?"
I made the best of it, but I felt wan. "It depends on what you call `much'!"
"Yes" -with all accommodation -"everything depends!"On this, however, he faced 
to the window again and presently reached it with his vague, restless, 
cogitating step. He remained there awhile with his forehead against the glass, 
in contemplation of the stupid shrubs I knew and the dull things of November. 
I had always my hypocrisy of `work', behind which I now gained the sofa. 
Steadying myself with it there as I had repeatedly done at those moments of 
torment that I have described as the moments of my knowing the children to be 
given to something from which I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of 
being prepared for the worst. But an extraordinary impression dropped on me as 
I extracted a meaning from the boy's embarrassed back -none other than the 
impression that I was not barred now. This inference grew in a few minutes to 
sharp intensity and seemed bound up with the direct perception that it was 
positively he who was. The frames and squares of the great window were a kind 
of image, for him, of a kind of failure. I felt that I saw him, at any rate, 
shut in or shut out. He was admirable, but not comfortable: I took it with a 
throb of hope. Wasn't he looking through the haunted pane for something he 
couldn't see? -and wasn't it the first time in the whole business that he had 
known such a lapse? The first, the very first: I found it a splendid portent. 
It made him anxious, though he watched himself; he had been anxious all day 
and, even while in his usual sweet little manner he sat at table, he had 
needed all his small strange genius to give it a gloss. When he at last turned 
round to meet me it was almost as if this genius had succumbed. "Well, I think 
I'm glad Bly agrees with me!"
"You would certainly seem to have seen, these twenty-four hours, a good deal 
more of it than for some time before. I hope," I went on bravely, "that you've 
been enjoying yourself."
"Oh, yes. I've been ever so far; all round about -miles and miles away. I've 
never been so free."
He had really a manner of his own, and I could only try to keep up with him. 
"Well, do you like it?"
He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words -"Do you?" -more 
discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain. Before I had time to 
deal with that, however, he continued as if with the sense that this was an 
impertinence to be softened. "Nothing could be more charming than the way you 
take it, for of course if we're alone together now it's you that are alone 
most. But I hope," he threw in, "you don't particularly mind!"
"Having to do with you?" I asked. "My dear child, how can I help minding? 
Though I've renounced all claim to your company, -you're so beyond me, -I at 
least greatly enjoy it. What else should I stay for?"
He looked at me more directly, and the expression of his face, graver now, 
struck me as the most beautiful I had ever found in it. "You stay on just for 
that?"
"Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest I take 
in you till something can be done for you that may be more worth your while. 
That needn't surprise you." My voice trembled so that I felt it impossible to 
suppress the shake. "Don't you remember how I told you, when I came and sat on 
your bed the night of the storm, that there was nothing in the world I 
wouldn't do for you?"
"Yes, yes!" He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had a tone to 
master; but he was so much more successful than I that, laughing out through 
his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly jesting. "Only that, I think, 
was to get me to do something for you!"
"It was partly to get you to do something," I conceded. "But, you know, you 
didn't do it."
"Oh, yes," he said with the brightest superficial eagerness, "you wanted me to 
tell you something."
"That's it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you know."
"Ah, then, is that what you've stayed over for?"
He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest little 
quiver of resentful passion; but I can't begin to express the effect upon me 
of an implication of surrender even so faint. It was as if what I had yearned 
for had come at last only to astonish me. "Well, yes -I may as well make a 
clean breast of it. It was precisely for that."
He waited so long that I supposed it for the purpose of repudiating the 
assumption on which my action had been founded; but what he finally said was: 
"Do you mean now -here?"
"There couldn't be a better place or time." He looked round him uneasily, and 
I had the rare -oh, the queer! -impression of the very first symptom I had 
seen in him of the approach of immediate fear. It was as if he were suddenly 
afraid of me -which struck me indeed as perhaps the best thing to make him. 
Yet in the very pang of the effort I felt it vain to try sternness, and I 
heard myself the next instant so gentle as to be almost grotesque. "You want 
so to go out again"
"Awfully!" He smiled at me heroically, and the touching little bravery of it 
was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He had picked up his hat, 
which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that gave me, even as 
I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of what I was doing. To do 
it in any way was an act of violence, for what did it consist of but the 
obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who 
had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse? 
Wasn't it base to create for a being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I 
suppose I now read into our situation a clearness it couldn't have had at the 
time, for I seem to see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a 
prevision on the anguish that was to come. So we circled about, with terrors 
and scruples, like fighters not daring to close. But it was for each other we 
feared! That kept us a little longer suspended and unbruised. "I'll tell you 
everything," Miles said -"I mean I'll tell you anything you like. You'll stay 
on with me, and we shall both be all right and I will tell you -I will. But 
not now."
"Why not now?"
My insistence turned him from me and kept him once more at his window in a 
silence during which, between us, you might have heard a pin drop. Then he was 
before me again with the air of a person for whom, outside, someone who had 
frankly to be reckoned with was waiting. "I have to see Luke."
I had not yet reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and I felt proportionately 
ashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies made up my truth. I achieved 
thoughtfully a few loops of my knitting. "Well, then, go to Luke, and I'll 
wait for what you promise. Only, in return for that, satisfy, before you leave 
me, one very much smaller request."
He looked as if he felt he had succeeded enough to be able still a little to 
bargain. "Very much smaller - - ?"
"Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me" -oh, my work preoccupied me, and 
I was offhand! -"if, yesterday afternoon, from the table in the hall, you 
took, you know, my letter."


24

My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from something that I 
can only describe as a fierce split of my attention -a stroke that at first, 
as I sprang straight up, reduced me to the mere blind movement of getting hold 
of him, drawing him close and, while I just fell for support against the 
nearest piece of furniture, instinctively keeping him with his back to the 
window. The appearance was full upon us that I already had to deal with here: 
Peter Quint had come into view like a sentinel before a prison. The next thing 
I saw was that, from outside, he had reached the window, and then I knew that, 
close to the glass and glaring through it, he offered once more to the room 
his white face of damnation. It represents but grossly what took place within 
me at the sight to say that on the second my decision was made; yet I believe 
that no woman so overwhelmed ever in so short a time recovered her command of 
the act. It came to me in the very horror of the immediate presence that the 
act would be, seeing and facing what I saw and faced, to keep the boy himself 
unaware. The inspiration -I can call it by no other name -was that I felt how 
voluntarily, how transcendently, I might. It was like fighting with a demon 
for a human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human 
soul -held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arms' length -had a perfect dew 
of sweat on a lovely childish forehead. The face that was close to mine was as 
white as the face against the glass, and out of it presently came a sound, not 
low nor weak, but as if from much further away, that I drank like a waft of 
fragrance.
"Yes -I took it."
At this, with a moan of joy, I enfolded, I drew him close; and while I held 
him to my breast, where I could feel in the sudden fever of his little body 
the tremendous pulse of his little heart, I kept my eyes on the thing at the 
window and saw it move and shift its posture. I have likened it to a sentinel, 
but its slow wheel, for a moment, was rather the prowl of a baffled beast. My 
present quickened courage, however, was such that, not to much to let it 
through, I had to shade, as it were, my flame. Meanwhile the glare of the face 
was again at the window, the scoundrel fixed as if to watch and wait. It was 
the very confidence that I might now defy him, as well as the positive 
certitude, by this time, of the child's unconsciousness, that made me go on. 
"What did you take it for?"
"To see what you said about me."
"You opened the letter?"
"I opened it."
My eyes were now, as I held him off a little again, on Miles's own face, in 
which the collapse of mockery showed me how complete was the ravage of 
uneasiness. What was prodigious was that at last, by my success, his sense was 
sealed and his communication stopped: he knew that he was in presence, but 
knew not of what, and knew still less that I also was and that I did know. And 
what did this strain of trouble matter when my eyes went back to the window 
only to see that the air was clear again and -by my personal triumph -the 
influence quenched? There was nothing there. I felt that the cause was mine 
and that I should surely get all. "And you found nothing!" -I let my elation 
out.
He gave the most mournful thoughtful little headshake. "Nothing."
"Nothing, nothing!" I almost shouted in my joy.
"Nothing, nothing," he sadly repeated.
I kissed his forehead; it was drenched. "So what have you done with it?"
"I've burnt it."
"Burnt it?" It was now or never. "Is that what you did at school?"
Oh, what this brought up! "At school?"
"Did you take letters? -or other things?"
"Other things?" He appeared now to be thinking of something far off and that 
reached him only through the pressure of his anxiety. Yet it did reach him. 
"Did I steal?"
I felt myself redden to the roots of my hair as well as wonder if it were more 
strange to put to a gentleman such a question or to see him take it with 
allowances that gave the very distance of his fall in the world. "Was it for 
that you mightn't go back?"
The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little surprise. "Did you know I 
mightn't go back?"
"I know everything."
He gave me at this the longest and strangest look. "Everything?"
"Everything. Therefore did you - - ?" But I couldn't say it again.
Miles could, very simply. "No. I didn't steal."
My face must have showed him I believed him utterly; yet my hands -but it was 
for pure tenderness -shook him as if to ask him why, if it was all for 
nothing, he had condemned me to months of torment. "What then did you do?"
He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew his breath, two 
or three times over, as if with difficulty. He might have been standing at the 
bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some faint green twilight. "Well -I 
said things."
"Only that?"
"They thought it was enough."
"To turn you out for?"
Never, truly, had a person `turned out' shown so little to explain it as this 
little person! He appeared to weigh my question, but in a manner quite 
detached and almost helpless. "Well, I suppose I oughtn't."
"But to whom did you say them?"
He evidently tried to remember, but it dropped -he had lost it. "I don't know!"
He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his surrender, which was indeed 
practically, by this time, so complete that I ought to have left it there. But 
I was infatuated -I was blind with victory, though even then the very effect 
that was to have brought him so much nearer was already that of added 
separation. "Was it to everyone?" I asked.
"No; it was only to - - " But he gave a sick little headshake. "I don't 
remember their names."
"Were they then so many?"
"No -only a few. Those I liked."
Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker 
obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the 
appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant 
confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I? 
Paralysed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the question, I let him go a 
little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh, he turned away from me again; which, 
as he faced toward the clear window, I suffered, feeling that I had nothing 
now there to keep him from. "And did they repeat what you said?" I went on 
after a moment.
He was soon at some distance from me, still breathing hard and again with the 
air, though now without anger for it, of being confined against his will. One 
more, ass he had done before, he looked up at the dim day as if, of what had 
hitherto sustained him, nothing was left but an unspeakable anxiety. "Oh, 
yes," he nevertheless replied -"they must have repeated them. To those they 
liked," he added.
There was, somehow, less of it than I had expected; but I turned it over. "And 
these things came round - - ?"
"00:02:30o the masters? Oh, yes!" he answered very simply. "But I didn't know 
they'd tell."
"The masters? They didn't -they've never told. That's why I ask you."
He turned to me again his beautiful fevered face. "Yes, it was too bad."
"Too bad?"
"What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home."
I can't name the exquisite pathos of the contradiction given to such a speech 
by such a speaker; I only know that the next instant I heard myself thrown off 
with homely force: "Stuff and nonsense!" But the next after that I must have 
sounded stern enough. "What were these things?"
My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him avert 
himself again, and that movement made me, with a single bound and an 
irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against the 
glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the hideous 
author of our woe -the white face of damnation. I felt a sick swim at the drop 
of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that the wildness of my 
veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. I saw him, from the midst of 
my act, meet it with a divination, and on the perception that even now he only 
guessed, and that the window was still to his own eyes free, I let the impulse 
flame up to convert the climax of his dismay into the very proof of his 
liberation. "No more, no more, no more!" I shrieked to my visitant as I tried 
to press him against me.
"Is she here?" Miles panted as he caught with his sealed eyes the direction of 
my words. Then as his strange `she' staggered me and, with a gasp, I echoed 
it, "Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!" he with a sudden fury gave me back.
I seized, stupefied, his supposition -some sequel to what we had done to 
Flora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still than 
that. "It's not Miss Jessel! But it's at the window -straight before us. It's 
there -the coward horror, there for the last time!"
At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled dog's 
on a scent and than gave a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at 
me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing 
wholly, though it now to my sense filled the room like the taste of poison, 
the wide overwhelming presence. "It's he?"
I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to challenge 
him. "Whom do you mean by `he'?"
"Peter Quint -you devil!" His face gave again, round the room, its convulsed 
supplication. "Where?"
They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his tribute 
to my devotion. "What does he matter now, my own? -what will he ever matter? I 
have you," I launched at the beast, "but he has lost you for ever!" Then, for 
the demonstration of my work, "There, there!" I said to Miles.
But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but 
the quiet of day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the 
cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered 
him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I 
held him -it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I 
began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, 
and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.