ghed. "Unless perhaps dear little Flora!"

"You really compare me to a baby girl?"

This found me singularly weak. "Don't you, then, LOVE our sweet Flora?"

"If I didn't--and you, too; if I didn't--!" he repeated as if retreating
for a jump, yet leaving his thought so unfinished that, after we had
come into the gate, another stop, which he imposed on me by the pressure
of his arm, had become inevitable. Mrs. Grose and Flora had passed into
the church, the other worshippers had followed, and we were, for the
minute, alone among the old, thick graves. We had paused, on the path
from the gate, by a low, oblong, tablelike tomb.

"Yes, if you didn't--?"

He looked, while I waited, at the graves. "Well, you know what!" But
he didn't move, and he presently produced something that made me drop
straight down on the stone slab, as if suddenly to rest. "Does my uncle
think what YOU think?"

I markedly rested. "How do you know what I think?"

"Ah, well, of course I don't; for it strikes me you never tell me. But I
mean does HE know?"

"Know what, Miles?"

"Why, the way I'm going on."

I perceived quickly enough that I could make, to this inquiry, no answer
that would not involve something of a sacrifice of my employer. Yet it
appeared to me that we were all, at Bly, sufficiently sacrificed to make
that venial. "I don't think your uncle much cares."

Miles, on this, stood looking at me. "Then don't you think he can be
made to?"

"In what way?"

"Why, by his coming down."

"But who'll get him to come down?"

"_I_ will!" the boy said with extraordinary brightness and emphasis. He
gave me another look charged with that expression and then marched off
alone into church.

XV

The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed
him. It was a pitiful surrender to agitation, but my being aware of this
had somehow no power to restore me. I only sat there on my tomb and read
into what my little friend had said to me the fullness of its meaning;
by the time I had grasped the whole of which I had also embraced, for
absence, the pretext that I was ashamed to offer my pupils and the rest
of the congregation such an example of delay. What I said to myself
above all was that Miles had got something out of me and that the proof
of it, for him, would be just this awkward collapse. He had got out
of me that there was something I was much afraid of and that he should
probably be able to make use of my fe