faltering at the first
chill gloom of its disuse, to pass across it and unbolt as quietly as I
could one of the shutters. Achieving this transit, I uncovered the
glass without a sound and, applying my face to the pane, was able, the
darkness without being much less than within, to see that I commanded
the right direction. Then I saw something more. The moon made the
night extraordinarily penetrable and showed me on the lawn a person,
diminished by distance, who stood there motionless and as if fascinated,
looking up to where I had appeared--looking, that is, not so much
straight at me as at something that was apparently above me. There was
clearly another person above me--there was a person on the tower; but
the presence on the lawn was not in the least what I had conceived and
had confidently hurried to meet. The presence on the lawn--I felt sick
as I made it out--was poor little Miles himself.

XI

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 addre