Chapter: "Oh, more or less." I fancy my smile was pale. "Not absolutely. We
shouldn't like that!" I went on.

"No--I suppose we shouldn't. Of course we have the others."

"We have the others--we have indeed the others," I concurred.

"Yet even though we have them," he returned, still with his hands in
his pockets and planted there in front of me, "they don't much count, do
they?"

I made the best of it, but I felt wan. "It depends on what you call
'much'!"

"Yes"--with all accommodation--"everything depends!" On this, however,
he faced to the window again and presently reached it with his vague,
restless, cogitating step. He remained there awhile, with his forehead
against the glass, in contemplation of the stupid shrubs I knew and the
dull things of November. I had always my hypocrisy of "work," behind
which, now, I gained the sofa. Steadying myself with it there as I had
repeatedly done at those moments of torment that I have described as the
moments of my knowing the children to be given to something from which
I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of being prepared for the
worst. But an extraordinary impression dropped on me as I extracted a
meaning from the boy's embarrassed back--none other than the impression
that I was not barred now. This inference grew in a few minutes to sharp
intensity and seemed bound up with the direct perception that it was
positively HE who was. The frames and squares of the great window were a
kind of image, for him, of a kind of failure. I felt that I saw him, at
any rate, shut in or shut out. He was admirable, but not comfortable: I
took it in with a throb of hope. Wasn't he looking, through the haunted
pane, for something he couldn't see?--and wasn't it the first time in
the whole business that he had known such a lapse? The first, the very
first: I found it a splendid portent. It made him anxious, though he
watched himself; he had been anxious all day and, even while in his
usual sweet little manner he sat at table, had needed all his small
strange genius to give it a gloss. When he at last turned round to meet
me, it was almost as if this genius had succumbed. "Well, I think I'm
glad Bly agrees with ME!"

"You would certainly seem to have seen, these twenty-four hours, a good
deal more of it than for some time before. I hope," I went on bravely,
"that you've been enjoying yourself."

"Oh, yes, I've been ever so far; all round about--miles and miles away.
I've never been so free."

He had really a manner of his own, and I could only try to keep up with
him. "Well, do you like it?"

He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words--"Do
YOU?"--more discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain.
Before I had time to deal with that, however, he continued as if with
the sense that this was an impertinence to be softened. "Nothing could
be more charming than the way you take it, for of course if we're alone
together now it's you that are alone most. But I hope," he threw in,
"you don't particularly mind!"

"Having to do with you?" I asked. "My dear child, how can I help
minding? Though I've renounced all claim to your company--you're so
beyond me--I at least greatly enjoy it. What else should I stay on for?"

He looked at me more directly, and the expression of his face, graver
now, struck me as the most beautiful I had ever found in it. "You stay
on just for THAT?"

"Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest
I take in you till something can be done for you that may be more worth
your while. That needn't surprise you." My voice trembled so that I felt
it impossible to suppress the shake. "Don't you remember how I told you,
when I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that there was
nothing in the world I wouldn't do for you?"

"Yes, yes!" He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had a tone
to master; but he was so much more successful than I that, laughing out
through his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly jesting. "Only
that, I think, was to get me to do something for YOU!"

"It was partly to get you to do something," I conceded. "But, you know,
you didn't do it."

"Oh, yes," he said with the brightest superficial eagerness, "you wanted
me to tell you something."

"That's it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you know."

"Ah, then, is THAT what you've stayed over for?"

He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest
little quiver of resentful passion; but I can't begin to express the
effect upon me of an implication of surrender even so faint. It was as
if what I had yearned for had come at last only to astonish me. "Well,
yes--I may as well make a clean breast of it, it was precisely for
that."

He waited so long that I supposed it for the purpose of repudiating the
assumption on which my action had been founded; but what he finally said
was: "Do you mean now--here?"

"There couldn't be a better place or time." He looked round him
uneasily, and I had the rare--oh, the queer!--impression of the very
first symptom I had seen in him of the approach of immediate fear.
It was as if he were suddenly afraid of me--which struck me indeed as
perhaps the best thing to make him. Yet in the very pang of the effort
I felt it vain to try sternness, and I heard myself the next instant so
gentle as to be almost grotesque. "You want so to go out again?"

"Awfully!" He smiled at me heroically, and the touching little bravery
of it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He had picked up
his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that
gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of
what I was doing. To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for what
did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt
on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the
possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn't it base to create for a
being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into
our situation a clearness it couldn't have had at the time, for I seem
to see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a prevision
of the anguish that was to come. So we circled about, with terrors and
scruples, like fighters not daring to close. But it was for each other
we feared! That kept us a little longer suspended and unbruised. "I'll
tell you everything," Miles said--"I mean I'll tell you anything you
like. You'll stay on with me, and we shall both be all right, and I WILL
tell you--I WILL. But not now."

"Why not now?"

My insistence turned him from me and kept him once more at his window
in a silence during which, between us, you might have heard a pin drop.
Then he was before me again with the air of a person for whom, outside,
someone who had frankly to be reckoned with was waiting. "I have to see
Luke."

I had not yet reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and I felt
proportionately ashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies made up my
truth. I achieved thoughtfully a few loops of my knitting. "Well, then,
go to Luke, and I'll wait for what you promise. Only, in return for
that, satisfy, before you leave me, one very much smaller request."

He looked as if he felt he had succeeded enough to be able still a
little to bargain. "Very much smaller--?"

"Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me"--oh, my work preoccupied
me, and I was offhand!--"if, yesterday afternoon, from the table in the
hall, you took, you know, my letter."

My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from something
that I can describe only as a fierce split of my attention--a stroke
that at first, as I sprang straight up, reduced me to the mere blind
movement of getting hold of him, drawing him close, and, while I just
fell for support against the nearest piece of furniture, instinctively
keeping him with his back to the window. The appearance was full upon us
that I had already had to deal with here: Peter Quint had come into view
like a sentinel before a prison. The next thing I saw was that, from
outside, he had reached the window, and then I knew that, close to the
glass and glaring in through it, he offered once more to the room his
white face of damnation. It represents but grossly what took place
within me at the sight to say that on the second my decision was made;
yet I believe that no woman so overwhelmed ever in so short a time
recovered her grasp of the ACT. It came to me in the very horror of the
immediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw
and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration--I can
call it by no other name--was that I felt how voluntarily, how
transcendently, I MIGHT. It was like fighting with a demon for a
human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human
soul--held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm's length--had a
perfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead. The face that was
close to mine was as white as the face against the glass, and out of it
presently came a sound, not low nor weak, but as if from much further
away, that I drank like a waft of fragrance.

"Yes--I took it."

At this, with a moan of joy, I enfolded, I drew him close; and while
I held him to my breast, where I could feel in the sudden fever of his
little body the tremendous pulse of his little heart, I kept my eyes on
the thing at the window and saw it move and shift its posture. I have
likened it to a sentinel, but its slow wheel, for a moment, was rather
the prowl of a baffled beast. My present quickened courage, however, was
such that, not too much to let it through, I had to shade, as it were,
my flame. Meanwhile the glare of the face was again at the window, the
scoundrel fixed as if to watch and wait. It was the very confidence that
I might now defy him, as well as the positive certitude, by this time,
of the child's unconsciousness, that made me go on. "What did you take
it for?"

"To see what you said about me."

"You opened the letter?"

"I opened it."

My eyes were now, as I held him off a little again, on Miles's own face,
in which the collapse of mockery showed me how complete was the ravage
of uneasiness. What was prodigious was that at last, by my success, his
sense was sealed and his communication stopped: he knew that he was in
presence, but knew not of what, and knew still less that I also was and
that I did know. And what did this strain of trouble matter when my eyes
went back to the window only to see that the air was clear again and--by
my personal triumph--the influence quenched? There was nothing there. I
felt that the cause was mine and that I should surely get ALL. "And you
found nothing!"--I let my elation out.

He gave the most mournful, thoughtful little headshake. "Nothing."

"Nothing, nothing!" I almost shouted in my joy.

"Nothing, nothing," he sadly repeated.

I kissed his forehead; it was drenched. "So what have you done with it?"

"I've burned it."

"Burned it?" It was now or never. "Is that what you did at school?"

Oh, what this brought up! "At school?"

"Did you take letters?--or other things?"

"Other things?" He appeared now to be thinking of something far off and
that reached him only through the pressure of his anxiety. Yet it did
reach him. "Did I STEAL?"

I felt myself redden to the roots of my hair as well as wonder if it
were more strange to put to a gentleman such a question or to see him
take it with allowances that gave the very distance of his fall in the
world. "Was it for that you mightn't go back?"

The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little surprise. "Did you
know I mightn't go back?"

"I know everything."

He gave me at this the longest and strangest look. "Everything?"

"Everything. Therefore DID you--?" But I couldn't say it again.

Miles could, very simply. "No. I didn't steal."

My face must have shown him I believed him utterly; yet my hands--but it
was for pure tenderness--shook him as if to ask him why, if it was all
for nothing, he had condemned me to months of torment. "What then did
you do?"

He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew his
breath, two or three times over, as if with difficulty. He might have
been standing at the bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some
faint green twilight. "Well--I said things."

"Only that?"

"They thought it was enough!"

"To turn you out for?"

Never, truly, had a person "turned out" shown so little to explain it
as this little person! He appeared to weigh my question, but in a manner
quite detached and almost helpless. "Well, I suppose I oughtn't."

"But to whom did you say them?"

He evidently tried to remember, but it dropped--he had lost it. "I don't
know!"

He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his surrender, which was
indeed practically, by this time, so complete that I ought to have left
it there. But I was infatuated--I was blind with victory, though even
then the very effect that was to have brought him so much nearer was
already that of added separation. "Was it to everyone?" I asked.

"No; it was only to--" But he gave a sick little headshake. "I don't
remember their names."

"Were they then so many?"

"No--only a few. Those I liked."

Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker
obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity
the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the
instant confounding and bottomless, for if he WERE innocent, what then
on earth was _I_? Paralyzed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the
question, I let him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh, he
turned away from me again; which, as he faced toward the clear window,
I suffered, feeling that I had nothing now there to keep him from. "And
did they repeat what you said?" I went on after a moment.

He was soon at some distance from me, still breathing hard and again
with the air, though now without anger for it, of being confined against
his will. Once more, as he had done before, he looked up at the dim
day as if, of what had hitherto sustained him, nothing was left but an
unspeakable anxiety. "Oh, yes," he nevertheless replied--"they must have
repeated them. To those THEY liked," he added.

There was, somehow, less of it than I had expected; but I turned it
over. "And these things came round--?"

"To the masters? Oh, yes!" he answered very simply. "But I didn't know
they'd tell."

"The masters? They didn't--they've never told. That's why I ask you."

He turned to me again his little beautiful fevered face. "Yes, it was
too bad."

"Too bad?"

"What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home."

I can't name the exquisite pathos of the contradiction given to such
a speech by such a speaker; I only know that the next instant I heard
myself throw off with homely force: "Stuff and nonsense!" But the next
after that I must have sounded stern enough. "What WERE these things?"

My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him
avert himself again, and that movement made ME, with a single bound and
an irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against
the glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the
hideous author of our woe--the white face of damnation. I felt a sick
swim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that
the wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. I
saw him, from the midst of my act, meet it with a divination, and on the
perception that even now he only guessed, and that the window was still
to his own eyes free, I let the impulse flame up to convert the climax
of his dismay into the very proof of his liberation. "No more, no
more, no more!" I shrieked, as I tried to press him against me, to my
visitant.

"Is she HERE?" Miles panted as he caught with his sealed eyes the
direction of my words. Then as his strange "she" staggered me and, with
a gasp, I echoed it, "Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!" he with a sudden fury
gave me back.

I seized, stupefied, his supposition--some sequel to what we had done to
Flora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still
than that. "It's not Miss Jessel! But it's at the window--straight
before us. It's THERE--the coward horror, there for the last time!"

At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled
dog's on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light,
he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place
and missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the
taste of poison, the wide, overwhelming presence. "It's HE?"

I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to
challenge him. "Whom do you mean by 'he'?"

"Peter Quint--you devil!" His face gave again, round the room, its
convulsed supplication. "WHERE?"

They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his
tribute to my devotion. "What does he matter now, my own?--what will he
EVER matter? _I_ have you," I launched at the beast, "but he has lost
you forever!" Then, for the demonstration of my work, "There, THERE!" I
said to Miles.

But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and
seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he
uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with
which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall.
I caught him, yes, I held him--it may be imagined with what a passion;
but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that
I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart,
dispossessed, had stopped.

 After Flora is gone, Miles joins the governess, and they talk about how they are alone. The governess explains that she stayed to be with and help Miles. She reminds him that she is willing to do anything for him, and he promises that he will tell her anything she wants to know. First, she asks him if he took the letter she had written to his uncle. The boy readily admits that he took it and opened it in order to see what she had written about him. He further admits that he found out nothing and burned the letter. The governess asks him if he stole letters at his school or did he take other things. Miles explains that he said certain bad things to his friends, who must have said the same things to other friends until it all got back to the masters. Just as the governess is about to insist on knowing what he said, she sees the apparition of Peter Quint at the window. She hears Miles ask if it is Miss Jessel, but she forces him to admit that it is Peter Quint who is at the window. He turns suddenly around to look and falls in her arms. The governess clutches him, but instead of a triumph, she discovers that she is holding Miles' dead body.

