“She has gone out.”

Mrs. Grose stared. “Without a hat?”

I naturally also looked volumes. “Isn’t that woman always without one?”

“She’s with _her?_”

“She’s with _her!_” I declared. “We must find them.”

My hand was on my friend’s arm, but she failed for the moment,
confronted with such an account of the matter, to respond to my
pressure. She communed, on the contrary, on the spot, with her
uneasiness. “And where’s Master Miles?”

“Oh, _he’s_ with Quint. They’re in the schoolroom.”

“Lord, miss!” My view, I was myself aware—and therefore I suppose my
tone—had never yet reached so calm an assurance. “The trick’s played,” I went on; “they’ve successfully worked their
plan. He found the most divine little way to keep me quiet while she
went off.”

“‘Divine’?” Mrs. Grose bewilderedly echoed. “Infernal, then!” I almost cheerfully rejoined. “He has provided for
himself as well. But come!”

She had helplessly gloomed at the upper regions. “You leave him—?”

“So long with Quint? Yes—I don’t mind that now.”

She always ended, at these moments, by getting possession of my hand,
and in this manner she could at present still stay me. But after
gasping an instant at my sudden resignation, “Because of your letter?”
she eagerly brought out. I quickly, by way of answer, felt for my letter, drew it forth, held it
up, and then, freeing myself, went and laid it on the great hall table. “Luke will take it,” I said as I came back. I reached the house door
and opened it; I was already on the steps. My companion still demurred: the storm of the night and the early
morning had dropped, but the afternoon was damp and gray. I came down
to the drive while she stood in the doorway. “You go with nothing on?”

“What do I care when the child has nothing? I can’t wait to dress,” I
cried, “and if you must do so, I leave you. Try meanwhile, yourself,
upstairs.”

“With _them?_” Oh, on this, the poor woman promptly joined me! XIX

We went straight to the lake, as it was called at Bly, and I daresay
rightly called, though I reflect that it may in fact have been a sheet
of water less remarkable than it appeared to my untraveled eyes. My
acquaintance with sheets of water was small, and the pool of Bly, at
all events on the few occasions of my consenting, under the protection
of my pupils, to affront its surface in the old flat-bottomed boat
moored there for our use, had impressed me both with its extent and its
agitation. The usual place of embarkation was half a mile from the
house, but I had an intimate conviction that, wherever Flora might be,
she was not near home. She had not given me the slip for any small
adventure, and, since the day of the very great one that I had shared
with her by the pond, I had been aware, in our walks, of the quarter to
which she most inclined. This was why I had now given to Mrs. Grose’s
steps so marked a direction—a direction that made her, when she
perceived it, oppose a resistance that showed me she was freshly
mystified. “You’re going to the water, Miss?—you think she’s _in_—?”

“She may be, though the depth is, I believe, nowhere very great. But
what I judge most likely is that she’s on the spot from which, the
other day, we saw together what I told you.”

“When she pretended not to see—?”

“With that astounding self-possession? I’ve always been sure she wanted
to go back alone. And now her brother has managed it for her.”

Mrs. Grose still stood where she had stopped. “You suppose they really
_talk_ of them?”

“I could meet this with a confidence! They say things that, if we heard
them, would simply appall us.”

“And if she _is_ there—”

“Yes?”

“Then Miss Jessel is?”

“Beyond a doubt. You shall see.”

“Oh, thank you!” my friend cried, planted so firm that, taking it in, I
went straight on without her. By the time I reached the pool, however,
she was close behind me, and I knew that, whatever, to her
apprehension, might befall me, the exposure of my society struck her as
her least danger. She exhaled a moan of relief as we at last came in
sight of the greater part of the water without a sight of the child. There was no trace of Flora on that nearer side of the bank where my
observation of her had been most startling, and none on the opposite
edge, where, save for a margin of some twenty yards, a thick copse came
down to the water. The pond, oblong in shape, had a width so scant
compared to its length that, with its ends out of view, it might have
been taken for a scant river. We looked at the empty expanse, and then
I felt the suggestion of my friend’s eyes. I knew what she meant and I
replied with a negative headshake. “No, no; wait! She has taken the boat.”

My companion stared at the vacant mooring place and then again across
the lake. “Then where is it?”

“Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs. She has used it to go
over, and then has managed to hide it.”

“All alone—that child?”

“She’s not alone, and at such times she’s not a child: she’s an old,
old woman.” I scanned all the visible shore while Mrs. Grose took
again, into the queer element I offered her, one of her plunges of
submission; then I pointed out that the boat might perfectly be in a
small refuge formed by one of the recesses of the pool, an indentation
masked, for the hither side, by a projection of the bank and by a clump
of trees growing close to the water. “But if the boat’s there, where on earth’s _she?_” my colleague
anxiously asked. “That’s exactly what we must learn.” And I started to walk further. “By going all the way round?”

“Certainly, far as it is. It will take us but ten minutes, but it’s far
enough to have made the child prefer not to walk. She went straight
over.”

“Laws!” cried my friend again; the chain of my logic was ever too much
for her. It dragged her at my heels even now, and when we had got
halfway round—a devious, tiresome process, on ground much broken and by
a path choked with overgrowth—I paused to give her breath. I sustained
her with a grateful arm, assuring her that she might hugely help me;
and this started us afresh, so that in the course of but few minutes
more we reached a point from which we found the boat to be where I had
supposed it. It had been intentionally left as much as possible out of
sight and was tied to one of the stakes of a fence that came, just
there, down to the brink and that had been an assistance to
disembarking. I recognized, as I looked at the pair of short, thick
oars, quite safely drawn up, the prodigious character of the feat for a
little girl; but I had lived, by this time, too long among wonders and
had panted to too many livelier measures. There was a gate in the
fence, through which we passed, and that brought us, after a trifling
interval, more into the open. Then, “There she is!” we both exclaimed
at once. Flora, a short way off, stood before us on the grass and smiled as if
her performance was now complete.