Chapter: 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.

 Flora looks shocked at the governess's words. Mrs. Grose suddenly gives a cry, and the governess turns to see Miss Jessel standing on the opposite bank of the lake. She feels a thrill to know that she finally has proof. She points across the lake, and Mrs. Grose looks there, but Flora's eyes remain fixed on the governess in an expression of accusation. The governess is certain Flora can also see Miss Jessel, and she sees this cold calm with which the child looks at her as proof of her evilness. She shouts at the child that Miss Jessel is there and she knows it. Mrs. Grose, though, shocks her when she asks where she sees anything. The governess tries to point Miss Jessel out, describing her and yelling at the woman to look, but Mrs. Grose cannot see her. The governess is shocked and terrified. Mrs. Grose turns to Flora, reassuring the child that there is no one there and that Miss Jessel is dead and buried, and turns to take Flora home. Flora now appears ugly to the governess, and she screams that she doesn't see anyone there and that she never has - saying also that she doesn't like the governess and crying to Mrs. Grose to take her away from the governess. The governess is certain that these words are controlled by someone else, and she finally says she's lost Flora, telling Mrs. Grose to take the child and go. The governess has no memory of what happened next but finds herself fifteen minutes later lying on the ground, where she must have thrown herself crying. She gets up and goes to the house, where she does not see Flora or Mrs. Grose that night. Flora's things have all been taken out of her room. She sits in the schoolroom, taking her tea, and does not even bother to ask the servants where Miles is. When he finally comes in and sits down at eight o'clock, they say nothing to each other.

