The Two Magics

esteem. We met, after I had brought home little Miles, more intimately than ever on the ground of my stupefaction, my general emot

ibly beautiful, and Mrs. Grose had put her finger on it: everything but a sort of passion of tenderness for him was swept away by his presence. What I then and there took him to my heart for was something divine that I have never found to the same degree in any child-his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love. It would have be

tood me. "You mean

instant. My dear w

is charm. "I assure you, Miss, I do nothing else

tter?" I had made up

o his

cisive.

the boy

derful. "

wipe to her mouth. "Then I'll

ently echoed, giving her

her apron again with her detached hand. "W

my arms and, after we had embraced like sist

sons with me, indeed, that charming summer, we all had a theory that he was to have; but I now feel that, for weeks, the lessons must have been rather my own. I learnt something-at first certainly-that had not been one of the teachings of my small, smothered life; learnt to be amused, and even amusing, and not to think for the morrow. It was the first time, in a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature. And then there was consideration-and consideration was sweet. Oh, it was a trap-not designed, but deep-to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever, in me, was most excitable. The best way to picture it all is to say that I was off my guard. They gave me so little trouble-th

last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from the old trees-I could take a turn into the grounds and enjoy, almost with a sense of property that amused and flattered me, the beauty and dignity of the place. It was a pleasure at these moments to feel myself tranquil and justified; doubtless, perhaps, also to reflect that by my discretion, my quiet good sense and general high propriety, I was giving pleasure-if he ever thought of it!-to the

me-by which I mean the face was-when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long June day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the plantations and coming into view of the house. What arrested me on the spot-and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for-was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!-but high up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower to which, on that first morning, little Flora had conducted me. This tower was one of a pair-square, incongruous, crenelated structures-that were distinguished, for some reason

it was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it in Harley Street-I had not seen it anywhere. The place, moreover, in the strangest way in the world, had, on the instant, and by the very fact of its appearance, become a solitude. To me at least, making my statement here with a deliberation with which I have never made it, the whole feeling of the moment returns. It was as if, while I took in-what I did take in-all the rest of the scene had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky and the frien

at all events,-and there was a touch of the strange freedom, as I remember, in the sign of familiarity of his wearing no hat,-seemed to fix me, from his position, with just the question, just the scrutiny through the fading light, that his own presence provoked. We were too far apart to call to each other, but there was a moment at which, at shorter range, some challenge between us, breaking the hush, would have been the right result of our straight mutual stare. He was in one of the angles, the one away from the house, very erect, as it struck me, and with both hand