Chapter: 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 pretention 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 is 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 learned something--at first, certainly--that had not been one
of the teachings of my small, smothered life; learned 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 afteryears could take
for them was that 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,
teatime and bedtime 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 daresay 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 nor 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 solitude. To me at least, making my statement
here with a deliberation with which I have never made it, the whole
feeling of the moment returns. 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, afterward, 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 whom 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 straight 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 crenelations 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.

 This awkward conversation doesn't stop Mrs. Grose and the Governess from growing closer. Their friendship is cemented by Miles's arrival; it turns out that Mrs. Grose was right; once the Governess lays eyes on the boy, all her fears about him dissipate. Miles is just as adorably adorable as his sister, and he inspires an incredible feeling of tenderness in his new teacher. His physical beauty is so great that it actually exudes a sense of purity and innocence. The Governess, after being swept off her feet by Miles's gorgeous exterior, immediately has a talk with Mrs. Grose - all of her suspicions about the boy have been erased. She decides to do nothing about the letter of dismissal from his school, and not to write to the children's uncle. The two women embrace like sisters, vowing that they'll take care of the children, despite Miles's school-related troubles. For a while, everything is just peachy keen. The Governess and her two angelic charges enjoy the summer at Bly; though there are difficulties that lie ahead , the women and children seem content to let everything slide a little in the summer months. In retrospect, the Governess sees this peaceful, idyllic time as "that hush in which something gathers or crouches" before springing to attack. Hmm. It doesn't take a genius to see that something bad is coming. During those summer days, the Governess enjoys taking a walk in the early evening, after the kiddies are tucked in bed and her work for the day is done. On these walks, she reflects upon the pleasure of her position in the world, and wonders if her obedience and discretion might give pleasure to her mysterious but longed for employer. Despite the fact that she only saw him twice, she's clearly fostering very special feelings for the children's uncle. One day, the Governess has an unpleasant surprise on her usually pleasant walk; as she idly daydreams of an encounter with a kind man , she is shocked to see a man actually appear. However, he doesn't materialize on the path in front of her, as she imagines, nor is he kind at all. The figure the Governess sees is far off - he's standing on one of the old towers connected to the house. Even at this distance, she can see him quite clearly. He's a stranger, and the Governess suddenly feels exposed and endangered, since she is a young woman alone, confronted with an unknown man. The mystery man and the Governess regard each other - she can't figure out who he is and what he's doing there. He's not wearing a hat, which suggests to the Governess that he's familiar with the house and is at ease there. The two are too far apart to speak, but they match gazes challengingly. The man keeps staring at the Governess as he stalks around the top of the tower - creepy.

