It
was part of what I already liked Mrs. Grose herself for, the pleasure I
could see her feel in my admiration and wonder as I sat at supper with
four tall candles and with my pupil, in a high chair and a bib,
brightly facing me, between them, over bread and milk. There were
naturally things that in Flora’s presence could pass between us only as
prodigious and gratified looks, obscure and roundabout allusions. “And the little boy—does he look like her? Is he too so very
remarkable?”

One wouldn’t flatter a child. “Oh, miss, _most_ remarkable. If you
think well of this one!”—and she stood there with a plate in her hand,
beaming at our companion, who looked from one of us to the other with
placid heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us. “Yes; if I do—?”

“You _will_ be carried away by the little gentleman!”

“Well, that, I think, is what I came for—to be carried away. I’m
afraid, however,” I remember feeling the impulse to add, “I’m rather
easily carried away. I was carried away in London!”

I can still see Mrs. Grose’s broad face as she took this in. “In Harley
Street?”

“In Harley Street.”

“Well, miss, you’re not the first—and you won’t be the last.”

“Oh, I’ve no pretension,” I could laugh, “to being the only one. My
other pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes back tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow—Friday, miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach, under
care of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage.”

I forthwith expressed that the proper as well as the pleasant and
friendly thing would be therefore that on the arrival of the public
conveyance I should be in waiting for him with his little sister; an
idea in which Mrs. Grose concurred so heartily that I somehow took her
manner as a kind of comforting pledge—never falsified, thank
heaven!—that we should on every question be quite at one. Oh, she was
glad I was there! What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could be fairly
called a reaction from the cheer of my arrival; it was probably at the
most only a slight oppression produced by a fuller measure of the
scale, as I walked round them, gazed up at them, took them in, of my
new circumstances. They had, as it were, an extent and mass for which I
had not been prepared and in the presence of which I found myself,
freshly, a little scared as well as a little proud. Lessons, in this
agitation, certainly suffered some delay; I reflected that my first
duty was, by the gentlest arts I could contrive, to win the child into
the sense of knowing me. I spent the day with her out-of-doors; I
arranged with her, to her great satisfaction, that it should be she,
she only, who might show me the place. She showed it step by step and
room by room and secret by secret, with droll, delightful, childish
talk about it and with the result, in half an hour, of our becoming
immense friends. Young as she was, I was struck, throughout our little
tour, with her confidence and courage with the way, in empty chambers
and dull corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause and even
on the summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy,
her morning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things than
she asked, rang out and led me on. I have not seen Bly since the day I
left it, and I daresay that to my older and more informed eyes it would
now appear sufficiently contracted. But as my little conductress, with
her hair of gold and her frock of blue, danced before me round corners
and pattered down passages, I had the view of a castle of romance
inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for
diversion of the young idea, take all color out of storybooks and
fairytales. Wasn’t it just a storybook over which I had fallen adoze
and adream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house,
embodying a few features of a building still older, half-replaced and
half-utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as
a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was,
strangely, at the helm! II

This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over with Flora to
meet, as Mrs. Grose said, the little gentleman; and all the more for an
incident that, presenting itself the second evening, had deeply
disconcerted me. The first day had been, on the whole, as I have
expressed, reassuring; but I was to see it wind up in keen
apprehension. The postbag, that evening—it came late—contained a letter
for me, which, however, in the hand of my employer, I found to be
composed but of a few words enclosing another, addressed to himself,
with a seal still unbroken. “This, I recognize, is from the headmaster,
and the headmaster’s an awful bore. Read him, please; deal with him;
but mind you don’t report. Not a word. I’m off!” I broke the seal with
a great effort—so great a one that I was a long time coming to it; took
the unopened missive at last up to my room and only attacked it just
before going to bed. I had better have let it wait till morning, for it
gave me a second sleepless night. With no counsel to take, the next
day, I was full of distress; and it finally got so the better of me
that I determined to open myself at least to Mrs. Grose. “What does it mean? The child’s dismissed his school.”

She gave me a look that I remarked at the moment; then, visibly, with a
quick blankness, seemed to try to take it back. “But aren’t they all—?”

“Sent home—yes. But only for the holidays. Miles may never go back at
all.”

Consciously, under my attention, she reddened. “They won’t take him?”

“They absolutely decline.”

At this she raised her eyes, which she had turned from me; I saw them
fill with good tears. “What has he done?”

I hesitated; then I judged best simply to hand her my letter—which,
however, had the effect of making her, without taking it, simply put
her hands behind her. She shook her head sadly. “Such things are not
for me, miss.”

My counselor couldn’t read! I winced at my mistake, which I attenuated
as I could, and opened my letter again to repeat it to her; then,
faltering in the act and folding it up once more, I put it back in my
pocket. “Is he really _bad_?”

The tears were still in her eyes. “Do the gentlemen say so?”

“They go into no particulars. They simply express their regret that it
should be impossible to keep him. That can have only one meaning.” Mrs.
Grose listened with dumb emotion; she forbore to ask me what this
meaning might be; so that, presently, to put the thing with some
coherence and with the mere aid of her presence to my own mind, I went
on: “That he’s an injury to the others.”

At this, with one of the quick turns of simple folk, she suddenly
flamed up. “Master Miles! _him_ an injury?”

There was such a flood of good faith in it that, though I had not yet
seen the child, my very fears made me jump to the absurdity of the
idea. I found myself, to meet my friend the better, offering it, on the
spot, sarcastically.