I seized my colleague's arm. "She's there, she's there!"
Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she
had stood the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the
first feeling now produced in me, my thrill of joy at having
brought on a proof. She was there, and I was justified;
she was there, and I was neither cruel nor mad.
She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there
most for Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps
so extraordinary as that in which I consciously threw out to her--
with the sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would
catch and understand it--an inarticulate message of gratitude.
She rose erect on the spot my friend and I had lately quitted,
and there was not, in all the long reach of her desire,
an inch of her evil that fell short. This first vividness
of vision and emotion were things of a few seconds,
during which Mrs. Grose's dazed blink across to where I pointed
struck me as a sovereign sign that she too at last saw,
just as it carried my own eyes precipitately to the child.
The revelation then of the manner in which Flora was affected
startled me, in truth, far more than it would have done to find
her also merely agitated, for direct dismay was of course not
what I had expected. Prepared and on her guard as our pursuit
had actually made her, she would repress every betrayal;
and I was therefore shaken, on the spot, by my first
glimpse of the particular one for which I had not allowed.
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