Chapter: 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. It 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 uninitiated 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; to 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's 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 gray. 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!
We went straight to the lake, as it was called at Bly, and I daresay
rightly called, though I reflect that it may in fact have been a sheet
of water less remarkable than it appeared to my untraveled 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 that made 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 a confidence! They say things that, if we heard
them, would simply appall 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 as 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.
The pond, oblong in shape, had a width so scant 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 expanse, 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 has 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 recognized,
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
it--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 valor 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 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?"

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 private 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 as 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 I had to accept, but sadly
shake my head at her. "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 round 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. Goodbye." For Mrs.
Grose I had an imperative, an almost frantic "Go, 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 sobbed, for when I raised my head the day was almost done.
I got up and looked a moment, through the twilight, at the gray pool and
its blank, haunted edge, and then I took, back to the 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, as by an ambiguous
compensation, I saw 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.

 The next day, the governess tells Mrs. Grose that the letter to the master is written, but she fails to mention that she has not yet mailed it. That day, Miles is exceptionally kind to the governess. He even volunteers to play the piano for her. Suddenly the governess asks where Flora is. Little Miles does not know, so she assumes that Flora is with Mrs. Grose. To her consternation, she discovers that the good housekeeper has not seen Flora. Then, the governess understands that Flora is with that woman. Also, little Miles is probably with Quint; and all the time he was being nice to the governess, he was simply covering up so that Flora could escape. Together with Mrs. Grose, the young woman goes straight to the lake in search of little Flora. The governess is convinced that the children are in communication with that awful pair and, moreover, "they say things, that, if we heard them, would simply appall us." On arriving at the lake, they discover that Flora has apparently taken the boat and gone to the other side. Mrs. Grose is dumbfounded that such a small girl could manage a boat alone, but the governess reminds her that Flora is not alone -- that woman is with her. They walk around the lake and find Flora, who meets them with her sweet gaiety. When the child asks where Miles is, the governess in turn asks little Flora, "Where is Miss Jessel?" Immediately upon hearing this question, Mrs. Grose utters a loud sound, which causes the governess to look up and see the figure of Miss Jessel standing on the other side of the lake. She points out this figure for both Mrs. Grose and little Flora, but the young pupil keeps her eyes glued on the governess. Mrs. Grose is unable to see anything in spite of the governess' explicit directions. After a few moments, Mrs. Grose addresses little Flora and tells her then there is no one there. "It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke." She wants to take little Flora home as fast as possible. Suddenly, the young girl cries out that she did not see anyone and never has. She wants to be taken away from the governess, who has been so cruel and frightening. Mrs. Grose takes the child and returns to the house. The governess is left alone to realize that the apparition appears only to the children and to herself. This will make it more difficult for her now. When she returns to the house, she finds that little Flora's things have been removed from the room.

