She offered her mind to my
disclosures as, had I wished to mix a witch's broth and proposed it
with assurance, she would have held out a large clean saucepan.
This had become thoroughly her attitude by the time that,
in my recital of the events of the night, I reached the point
of what Miles had said to me when, after seeing him, at such
a monstrous hour, almost on the very spot where he happened
now to be, I had gone down to bring him in; choosing then,
at the window, with a concentrated need of not alarming the house,
rather that method than a signal more resonant. I had left
her meanwhile in little doubt of my small hope of representing
with success even to her actual sympathy my sense of the real
splendor of the little inspiration with which, after I had got
him into the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge.
As soon as I appeared in the moonlight on the terrace,
he had come to me as straight as possible; on which I had taken
his hand without a word and led him, through the dark spaces,
up the staircase where Quint had so hungrily hovered for him,
along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, and so to
his forsaken room.
Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered--
oh, HOW I had wondered!--if he were groping about in his
little mind for something plausible and not too grotesque.
It would tax his invention, certainly, and I felt, this time,
over his real embarrassment, a curious thrill of triumph.
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