The Two Magics

o live with as we could-my dreadful liability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplified, and my

ng together to the schoolroom and shutting ourselves up there to have everything out. The result of our having everything out was simply to reduce our situation to the last rigour of its elements. She herself had seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow, and nobody in the house but the governess was in the governess'

to be wholly sure of what my honest ally was prepared for to keep terms with so compromising a contract. I was queer company enough-quite as queer as the company I received; but as I trace over what we went through I see how much common ground we must have found in the one idea that, by good fortune, could steady us. It was the idea,

meone else, you say-so

portentous clearness now possessed

w do yo

!" My exaltation grew.

t even so much telling as that. She resumed in a

s? That's wh

nsely scared ag

ad an absolute certainty that I should see again what I had already seen, but something within me said that by offering myself bravely as the sole subject of such experience, by accepting, by inviting, by surmounting it al

that my pupils have

y pulled up. "His having been here

m, and his name, his presen

doesn't remember. She

ght with some intensity. "Perhaps not. B

him!" broke f

ven me. "Don't be afraid." I conti

s never spo

sion. And you tell me th

s Quint's own fancy. To play with him, I mean-to spoil him." S

of his face-such a face!-a sudden sick

e with e

apprehension, in the lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions, had ever, within anyone's memory, attached to the kind old place. It had neither bad name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose, most apparently, only desired to cling to me

y. I knew it-but t

never t

laints. He was terribly short with anything of t

e was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very particular perhaps about some of the com

. "I dare say I was wrong.

id of

uld do. Quint was so c

bly, I showed. "You weren't afraid of

with a face of anguish an

precious lives. They

d in him and placed him here because he was supposed not to be well and the country air

d to smother a kind of how

an't now!" And the poor

that by the time the morrow's sun was high I had restlessly read into the facts before us almost all the meaning they were to receive from subsequent and more cruel occurrences. What they gave me above all was just the sinister figure of the living man-the dead one would keep awhile!-and of the months he had continuously passed at Bly, which, added up, made a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time had arrived only when, on the dawn of a winter's morning, Peter Quint was found, by a labourer going to early work, stone dead on the road from the village: a catastrophe explained-superf

er applaud myself as I look back!-that I saw my service so strongly and so simply. I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most loveable, the appeal of whose helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one's own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I-well, I had them. It was in short a magnificent chance. This chance

warm. I was aware afresh, with her, as we went, of how, like her brother, she contrived-it was the charming thing in both children-to let me alone without appearing to drop me and to accompany me without appearing to surround. They were never importunate and yet never listless. My attention to them all really went to seeing them amuse themselves immensely without me: this was a spectacle they seemed actively to prepare and that engaged me as an active admirer. I walked in a world of their invention-they had n

made a great and pleasant shade, but it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour. There was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in the conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raising my eyes. They were attached at this juncture to the stitching in which I was engaged, and I can feel once more the spasm of my effort not to move them till I should so have steadied myself as to be able to make up my mind what to do. There was an alien object in view-a

rest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited, but nothing came; then, in the first place-and there is something more dire in this, I feel, than in anything I have to relate-I was determined by a sense that, within a minute, all sounds from her had previously dropped; and, in the second, by the circumstance that, also within the minute, she had, in her play, turned her back to the water. This was her attitude when I at last looked at her-looked with the confirmed conviction that we were still, together, under dir