Chapter: It was not till late next day that I spoke to Mrs. Grose; the rigor 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 that of a discussion of
mysteries. I drew a great security in this particular from her mere
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 splendor of the little inspiration with which, after I had got him
into the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge. As soon as I
appeared in the moonlight on the terrace, he had come to me as straight
as possible; on which I had taken his hand without a word and led him,
through the dark spaces, up the staircase where Quint had so hungrily
hovered for him, along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, and
so to his forsaken room.

Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered--oh,
HOW I had wondered!--if he were groping about in his little mind for
something plausible and not too grotesque. It would tax his invention,
certainly, and I felt, this time, over his real embarrassment, a curious
thrill of triumph. It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldn't
play any longer at innocence; so how the deuce would he get out of it?
There beat in me indeed, with the passionate throb of this question an
equal dumb appeal as to how the deuce _I_ should. I was confronted at
last, as never yet, with all the risk attached even now to sounding my
own horrid note. I remember in fact that as we pushed into his little
chamber, where the bed had not been slept in at all and the window,
uncovered to the moonlight, made the place so clear that there was no
need of striking a match--I remember how I suddenly dropped, sank upon
the edge of the bed from the force of the idea that he must know how he
really, as they say, "had" me. He could do what he liked, with all his
cleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer to the
old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who
minister to superstitions and fears. He "had" me indeed, and in a cleft
stick; for who would ever absolve me, who would consent that I should go
unhung, if, by the faintest tremor of an overture, I were the first to
introduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire? No, no: it
was useless to attempt to convey to Mrs. Grose, just as it is scarcely
less so to attempt to suggest here, how, in our short, stiff brush in
the dark, he fairly shook me with admiration. I was of course thoroughly
kind and merciful; never, never yet had I placed on his little shoulders
hands of such tenderness as those with which, while I rested against the
bed, I held him there well under fire. I had no alternative but, in form
at least, to put it to him.

"You must tell me now--and all the truth. What did you go out for? What
were you doing there?"

I can still see his wonderful smile, the whites of his beautiful eyes,
and the uncovering of his little teeth shine to me in the dusk. "If I
tell you why, will you understand?" My heart, at this, leaped into my
mouth. WOULD he tell me why? I found no sound on my lips to press it,
and I was aware of replying only with a vague, repeated, grimacing nod.
He was gentleness itself, and while I wagged my head at him he stood
there more than ever a little fairy prince. It was his brightness indeed
that gave me a respite. Would it be so great if he were really going to
tell me? "Well," he said at last, "just exactly in order that you should
do this."

"Do what?"

"Think me--for a change--BAD!" I shall never forget the sweetness and
gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of it, he
bent forward and kissed me. It was practically the end of everything.
I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minute in my
arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given exactly the
account of himself that permitted least of my going behind it, and it
was only with the effect of confirming my acceptance of it that, as I
presently glanced about the room, I could say--

"Then you didn't undress at all?"

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

"And when did you go down?"

"At midnight. When I'm bad I AM bad!"

"I see, I see--it's charming. But how could you be sure I would know
it?"

"Oh, I arranged that with Flora." His answers rang out with a readiness!
"She was to get up and look out."

"Which is what she did do." It was I who fell into the trap!

"So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at, you also
looked--you saw."

"While you," I concurred, "caught your death in the night air!"

He literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford radiantly
to assent. "How otherwise should I have been bad enough?" he asked.
Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview closed on my
recognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his joke, he had
been able to draw upon.

 Late the next day, the Governess meets up with Mrs. Grose to reveal what she saw the previous night. Their meetings have been made more difficult by the Governess's constant watch over the children, but the younger woman still draws comfort from them. She speaks rather condescendingly of Mrs. Grose's complete lack of imagination, which is apparently a good thing in this context - it saves her from worrying about the children as much as she could. Mrs. Grose listens as the Governess relates the event of the last night. Here goes... The Governess went out to fetch Miles after she saw him from the window. He came to her willingly, and she took him silently inside, back to his room. The Governess admits to feeling a little thrill of triumph at this moment; how could he possibly make up a plausible excuse for this action? The Governess was suddenly struck with the fear that perhaps Miles had her under his control; she felt a kind of admiration for him. With nothing else to do, the Governess asked Miles straight up what he was doing out on the lawn. He cunningly told her that he wanted to get her to think that he was a bad boy for once. He claims that he stayed up late reading, and went down to the lawn at midnight. He and Flora had planned earlier for the little girl to wake up so that the Governess would notice her at the window, and in turn notice Miles outside. He made it out to be a playful trap that the Governess walked right into. What are we to make of all this? We're not quite sure yet.

