The Two Magics

ble account of how I fought out the interval. Yet I still hear myself cry as I fair

?" I felt her incred

d me, I made it out to her, made it out perhaps only now with full coherency eve

have taken a blow in the stomach

erself! The child of eight, that child!" Unutte

ould only gape the wider

h my eyes: saw that sh

ean aware

"Another person-this time; but a figure of quite as unmistakeable horror and evil: a woman in black, pale and dreadful-with such an air

ow-from

! She just appeared and st

out comin

the feeling, she might h

se, fell back a step. "Was s

u have." Then, to show how I had thought it

s Je

ou don't believ

left in her distress.

Then ask Flora-she's sure!" But I had no sooner spoken than I caught m

ildered instinctively to p

r. Flora doesn't

then to s

the more I see in it, and the more I see in it the more

with me. "You mean you're

now!" Then I explained.

ly looked wan. "I d

ep it up-and that the child assu

from the positive force of the sense of what, should we yield an inch, there would really be to give way to. "Dear, de

hings-a scrap

her blessed innocence?"

at that-we must cling to it! If it isn't a proof of what you say, i

nute on the ground; then at last raising

t it's what sh

know," my frien

g her! By the w

you mean-s

e that. She gave me never a gl

ied to see it

such awf

might really have resembled

no. Of somethi

ke?"-this left he

ndescribable. With a ki

turn pale.

gave a shudder and walked to the window; and while she stood ther

ned round. "The person

to what I had at last, stroke by stroke, brought the victim of my confidence, for she quite vi

in both her own, holding it as tight as if to fortify me against the increase of al

d, "the great decency of your not having hitherto spoken; but the time has certainly come to give me the whole thing." She appeared to assent

was eve

of the dif

ondition"-she brought it wo

I again saw. "Ye

dfully below,"

ceptance of my companion's own measure of my predecessor's abasement. There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more readily for my f

little a case for a sense of shades. "I've n

th

them

ny rate, for an instant, to see their evocation of her as distinctly as I had seen her

ad been indeed, but she said at the s

ow what she die

w; I was glad enough I didn't; and I th

ad, then,

't have stayed. Fancy it here-for a governess! And afterwards I

compassion for me, and at the renewed touch of her kindness my power to resist broke down. I burst, as I had, the other time, made her burst, into tears; she took me