I should not have been prompted, by stress of need, by desperation
of mind--I scarce know what to call it--to invoke such further
aid to intelligence as might spring from pushing my colleague
fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit by bit, under pressure,
a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong side of it
all still sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat;
and I remember how on this occasion--for the sleeping house and
the concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to help--
I felt the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain.
"I don't believe anything so horrible," I recollect saying;
"no, let us put it definitely, my dear, that I don't. But if I did,
you know, there's a thing I should require now, just without sparing
you the least bit more--oh, not a scrap, come!--to get out of you.
What was it you had in mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back,
over the letter from his school, you said, under my insistence,
that you didn't pretend for him that he had not literally EVER
been `bad'? He has NOT literally `ever,' in these weeks that I
myself have lived with him and so closely watched him; he has been
an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful, lovable goodness.
Therefore you might perfectly have made the claim for him
if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take.
What was your exception, and to what passage in your personal
observation of him did you refer?"
It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and, at any
rate, before the gray dawn admonished us to separate I had got my answer.
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