Instead of succumbing I sprang again to my feet, looked at her bed,
and took a helpless middle way. "Why did you pull the curtain
over the place to make me think you were still there?"
Flora luminously considered; after which, with her little divine smile:
"Because I don't like to frighten you!"
"But if I had, by your idea, gone out--?"
She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame
of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate
as impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine. "Oh, but you know,"
she quite adequately answered, "that you might come back, you dear,
and that you HAVE!" And after a little, when she had got into bed,
I had, for a long time, by almost sitting on her to hold her hand,
to prove that I recognized the pertinence of my return.
You may imagine the general complexion, from that moment, of my nights.
I repeatedly sat up till I didn't know when; I selected moments when my
roommate unmistakably slept, and, stealing out, took noiseless turns
in the passage and even pushed as far as to where I had last met Quint.
But I never met him there again; and I may as well say at once
that I on no other occasion saw him in the house. I just missed,
on the staircase, on the other hand, a different adventure.
Looking down it from the top I once recognized the presence of a woman
seated on one of the lower steps with her back presented to me,
her body half-bowed and her head, in an attitude of woe, in her hands.
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