"The circumstances of his death?" I thought with some intensity.
"Perhaps not. But Miles would remember--Miles would know."

"Ah, don't try him!" broke from Mrs. Grose.

I returned her the look she had given me. "Don't be afraid." I continued
to think. "It IS rather odd."

"That he has never spoken of him?"

"Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were 'great
friends'?"

"Oh, it wasn't HIM!" Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. "It was Quint's
own fancy. To play with him, I mean--to spoil him." She paused a moment;
then she added: "Quint was much too free."

This gave me, straight from my vision of his face--SUCH a face!--a
sudden sickness of disgust. "Too free with MY boy?"

"Too free with everyone!"

I forbore, for the moment, to analyze this description further than by
the reflection that a part of it applied to several of the members of
the household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still of our
small colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension, in the
lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions,
had ever, within anyone's memory attached to the kind old place. It had
neither bad name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose, most apparently, only
desired to cling to me and to quake in silence. I even put her, the very
last thing of all, to the test. It was when, at midnight, she had her
hand on the schoolroom door to take leave. "I have it from you then--for
it's of great importance--that he was definitely and admittedly bad?"

"Oh, not admittedly. _I_ knew it--but the master didn't."

"And you never told him?"

"Well, he didn't like tale-bearing--he hated complaints. He was terribly
short with anything of that kind, and if people were all right to HIM--"

"He wouldn't be bothered with more?" This squared well enough with my
impressions of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very
particular perhaps about some of the company HE kept. All the same, I
pressed my interlocutress. "I promise you _I_ would have told!"

She felt my discrimination. "I daresay I was wrong. But, really, I was
afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"Of things that man could do. Quint was so clever--he was so deep."

I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. "You weren't afraid
of anything else? Not of his effect--?"

"His effect?" she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while I
faltered.

"On innocent little precious lives. They were in your charge."