"No, they were not in mine!" she roundly and distressfully returned.
"The master believed in him and placed him here because he was supposed
not to be well and the country air so good for him. So he had everything
to say. Yes"--she let me have it--"even about THEM."

"Them--that creature?" I had to smother a kind of howl. "And you could
bear it!"

"No. I couldn't--and I can't now!" And the poor woman burst into tears.

A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow them;
yet how often and how passionately, for a week, we came back together
to the subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night, I was, in
the immediate later hours in especial--for it may be imagined whether I
slept--still haunted with the shadow of something she had not told me.
I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs. Grose had kept
back. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this was not from a failure
of frankness, but because on every side there were fears. It seems to me
indeed, in retrospect, that by the time the morrow's sun was high I had
restlessly read into the fact before us almost all the meaning they were
to receive from subsequent and more cruel occurrences. What they gave me
above all was just the sinister figure of the living man--the dead one
would keep awhile!--and of the months he had continuously passed at Bly,
which, added up, made a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time
had arrived only when, on the dawn of a winter's morning, Peter Quint
was found, by a laborer going to early work, stone dead on the road
from the village: a catastrophe explained--superficially at least--by a
visible wound to his head; such a wound as might have been produced--and
as, on the final evidence, HAD been--by a fatal slip, in the dark and
after leaving the public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong
path altogether, at the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn
mistaken at night and in liquor, accounted for much--practically, in
the end and after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything; but
there had been matters in his life--strange passages and perils, secret
disorders, vices more than suspected--that would have accounted for a
good deal more.

I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible
picture of my state of mind; but I was in these days literally able to
find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded
of me. I now saw th