But you won’t.”

“No, not _that_ again. It was nothing.”

“It was nothing,” I said. “But we must go on.”

He resumed our walk with me, passing his hand into my arm. “Then when
_am_ I going back?”

I wore, in turning it over, my most responsible air. “Were you very
happy at school?”

He just considered. “Oh, I’m happy enough anywhere!”

“Well, then,” I quavered, “if you’re just as happy here—!”

“Ah, but that isn’t everything! Of course _you_ know a lot—”

“But you hint that you know almost as much?” I risked as he paused. “Not half I want to!” Miles honestly professed. “But it isn’t so much
that.”

“What is it, then?”

“Well—I want to see more life.”

“I see; I see.” We had arrived within sight of the church and of
various persons, including several of the household of Bly, on their
way to it and clustered about the door to see us go in. I quickened our
step; I wanted to get there before the question between us opened up
much further; I reflected hungrily that, for more than an hour, he
would have to be silent; and I thought with envy of the comparative
dusk of the pew and of the almost spiritual help of the hassock on
which I might bend my knees. I seemed literally to be running a race
with some confusion to which he was about to reduce me, but I felt that
he had got in first when, before we had even entered the churchyard, he
threw out—

“I want my own sort!”

It literally made me bound forward. “There are not many of your own
sort, Miles!” I laughed. “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 fear to gain, for his
own purpose, more freedom. My fear was of having to deal with the
intolerable question of the grounds of his dismissal from school, for
that was really but the question of the horrors gathered behind. That
his uncle should arrive to treat with me of these things was a solution
that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired to bring on; but I
could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it that I simply
procrastinated and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to my deep
discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to say to
me: “Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this
interruption of my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you
a life that’s so unnatural for a boy.” What was so unnatural for the
particular boy I was concerned with was this sudden revelation of a
consciousness and a plan. That was what really overcame me, what prevented my going in. I walked
round the church, hesitating, hovering; I reflected that I had already,
with him, hurt myself beyond repair. Therefore I could patch up
nothing, and it was too extreme an effort to squeeze beside him into
the pew: he would be so much more sure than ever to pass his arm into
mine and make me sit there for an hour in close, silent contact with
his commentary on our talk. For the first minute since his arrival I
wanted to get away from him. As I paused beneath the high east window
and listened to the sounds of worship, I was taken with an impulse that
might master me, I felt, completely should I give it the least
encouragement. I might easily put an end to my predicament by getting
away altogether. Here was my chance; there was no one to stop me; I
could give the whole thing up—turn my back and retreat. It was only a
question of hurrying again, for a few preparations, to the house which
the attendance at church of so many of the servants would practically
have left unoccupied. No one, in short, could blame me if I should just
drive desperately off. What was it to get away if I got away only till
dinner? That would be in a couple of hours, at the end of which—I had
the acute prevision—my little pupils would play at innocent wonder
about my nonappearance in their train. “What _did_ you do, you naughty, bad thing? Why in the world, to worry
us so—and take our thoughts off, too, don’t you know?—did you desert us
at the very door?” I couldn’t meet such questions nor, as they asked
them, their false little lovely eyes; yet it was all so exactly what I
should have to meet that, as the prospect grew sharp to me, I at last
let myself go. I got, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away; I came
straight out of the churchyard and, thinking hard, retraced my steps
through the park. It seemed to me that by the time I reached the house
I had made up my mind I would fly. The Sunday stillness both of the
approaches and of the interior, in which I met no one, fairly excited
me with a sense of opportunity. Were I to get off quickly, this way, I
should get off without a scene, without a word.