Chapter: 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 stared. "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 nonetheless 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."

 Mrs. Grose is nonplussed by the governess's account, and so the governess explains her conclusion that the children have been meeting consistently with Quint and Miss Jessel. She goes so far as to claim that as the children stroll, they are "talking horrors" and plotting their next meeting with their two ghostly friends. The governess, piecing things together, says that the children have not been good but empty, and their lives belong to Quint and Miss Jessel. Furthermore, the governess surmises, Quint and Miss Jessel "want to get" the children to destroy them and keep up their diabolical work. Mrs. Grose suggests that the governess write to her employer, asking him to take the children away. The governess rejects that idea, saying he will think her mad. Mrs. Grose throws out an alternative plan for the governess to make her employer come to her. At this, the governess foresees his amusement and derision at what he will perceive to be her loneliness. She threatens to leave if Mrs. Grose appeals to the children's uncle on her behalf

