ssed 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