"I'll be hanged,"
it said, "if _I_'ll speak!"
It was Flora who, gazing all over me in candid wonder,
was the first. She was struck with our bareheaded aspect.
"Why, where are your things?"
"Where yours are, my dear!" I promptly returned.
She had already got back her gaiety, and appeared to take
this as an answer quite sufficient. "And where's Miles?"
she went on.
There was something in the small valor of it that quite finished me:
these three words from her were, in a flash like the glitter of a
drawn blade, the jostle of the cup that my hand, for weeks and weeks,
had held high and full to the brim that now, even before speaking,
I felt overflow in a deluge. "I'll tell you if you'll tell ME--"
I heard myself say, then heard the tremor in which it broke.
"Well, what?"
Mrs. Grose's suspense blazed at me, but it was too late now,
and I brought the thing out handsomely. "Where, my pet,
is Miss Jessel?"
XX
Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was upon us.
Much as I had made of the fact that this name had never once,
between us, been sounded, the quick, smitten glare with
which the child's face now received it fairly likened
my breach of the silence to the smash of a pane of glass.
It added to the interposing cry, as if to stay the blow,
that Mrs. Grose, at the same instant, uttered over my violence--
the shriek of a creature scared, or rather wounded, which, in turn,
within a few seconds, was completed by a gasp of my own.
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