What was your exception, and to what passage in your personal
observation of him did you refer?”

It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and,
at any rate, before the gray dawn admonished us to separate I had got
my answer. What my friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to the
purpose. It was neither more nor less than the circumstance that for a
period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually
together. It was in fact the very appropriate truth that she had
ventured to criticize the propriety, to hint at the incongruity, of so
close an alliance, and even to go so far on the subject as a frank
overture to Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel had, with a most strange manner,
requested her to mind her business, and the good woman had, on this,
directly approached little Miles. What she had said to him, since I
pressed, was that _she_ liked to see young gentlemen not forget their
station. I pressed again, of course, at this. “You reminded him that Quint was
only a base menial?”

“As you might say! And it was his answer, for one thing, that was bad.”

“And for another thing?” I waited. “He repeated your words to Quint?”

“No, not that. It’s just what he _wouldn’t!_” she could still impress
upon me. “I was sure, at any rate,” she added, “that he didn’t. But he
denied certain occasions.”

“What occasions?”

“When they had been about together quite as if Quint were his tutor—and
a very grand one—and Miss Jessel only for the little lady. When he had
gone off with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours with him.”

“He then prevaricated about it—he said he hadn’t?” Her assent was clear
enough to cause me to add in a moment: “I see. He lied.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Grose mumbled. This was a suggestion that it didn’t matter;
which indeed she backed up by a further remark. “You see, after all,
Miss Jessel didn’t mind. She didn’t forbid him.”

I considered. “Did he put that to you as a justification?”

At this she dropped again. “No, he never spoke of it.”

“Never mentioned her in connection with Quint?”

She saw, visibly flushing, where I was coming out. “Well, he didn’t
show anything. He denied,” she repeated; “he denied.”

Lord, how I pressed her now! “So that you could see he knew what was
between the two wretches?”

“I don’t know—I don’t know!” the poor woman groaned. “You do know, you dear thing,” I replied; “only you haven’t my dreadful
boldness of mind, and you keep back, out of timidity and modesty and
delicacy, even the impression that, in the past, when you had, without
my aid, to flounder about in silence, most of all made you miserable. But I shall get it out of you yet! There was something in the boy that
suggested to you,” I continued, “that he covered and concealed their
relation.”

“Oh, he couldn’t prevent—”

“Your learning the truth? I daresay! But, heavens,” I fell, with
vehemence, athinking, “what it shows that they must, to that extent,
have succeeded in making of him!”

“Ah, nothing that’s not nice _now!_” Mrs. Grose lugubriously pleaded. “I don’t wonder you looked queer,” I persisted, “when I mentioned to
you the letter from his school!”

“I doubt if I looked as queer as you!” she retorted with homely force. “And if he was so bad then as that comes to, how is he such an angel
now?”

“Yes, indeed—and if he was a fiend at school! How, how, how? Well,” I
said in my torment, “you must put it to me again, but I shall not be
able to tell you for some days. Only, put it to me again!” I cried in a
way that made my friend stare. “There are directions in which I must
not for the present let myself go.” Meanwhile I returned to her first
example—the one to which she had just previously referred—of the boy’s
happy capacity for an occasional slip. “If Quint—on your remonstrance
at the time you speak of—was a base menial, one of the things Miles
said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another.” Again
her admission was so adequate that I continued: “And you forgave him
that?”

“Wouldn’t _you?_”

“Oh, yes!” And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of the
oddest amusement. Then I went on: “At all events, while he was with the
man—”

“Miss Flora was with the woman. It suited them all!”

It suited me, too, I felt, only too well; by which I mean that it
suited exactly the particularly deadly view I was in the very act of
forbidding myself to entertain. But I so far succeeded in checking the
expression of this view that I will throw, just here, no further light
on it than may be offered by the mention of my final observation to
Mrs. Grose. “His having lied and been impudent are, I confess, less
engaging specimens than I had hoped to have from you of the outbreak in
him of the little natural man. Still,” I mused, “They must do, for they
make me feel more than ever that I must watch.”

It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friend’s face how much
more unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck me as
presenting to my own tenderness an occasion for doing. This came out
when, at the schoolroom door, she quitted me. “Surely you don’t accuse
_him_—”

“Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me? Ah, remember
that, until further evidence, I now accuse nobody.” Then, before
shutting her out to go, by another passage, to her own place, “I must
just wait,” I wound up. IX

I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from
my consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant
sight of my pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to
grievous fancies and even to odious memories a kind of brush of the
sponge. I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish
grace as a thing I could actively cultivate, and it may be imagined if
I neglected now to address myself to this source for whatever it would
yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort to
struggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have been, however,
a greater tension still had it not been so frequently successful. I
used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought
strange things about them; and the circumstances that these things only
made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping
them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they _were_ so
immensely more interesting. Putting things at the worst, at all events,
as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of their innocence could
only be—blameless and foredoomed as they were—a reason the more for
taking risks. There were moments when, by an irresistible impulse, I
found myself catching them up and pressing them to my heart. As soon as
I had done so I used to say to myself: “What will they think of that?