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Chapter 12 The particular impression I had received proved in the morning light, I repeat, not quite successfully presentable to Mrs. Grose, though I reinforced it with the mention of still another remark that he had made before we separated. It all lies in half a dozen words, I said to her, words that really settle the matter. Think, you know, what I might do! He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down to the ground what he might do. Thats what he gave them a taste of at school. Lord, you do change! cried my friend. I dont changeI simply make it out. The four, depend upon it, perpetually meet. If on either of these last nights you had been with either child, you would clearly have understood. The more Ive watched and waited the more Ive felt that if there were nothing else to make it sure it would be made so by the systematic silence of each. Never, by a slip of the tongue, have they so much as alluded to either of their old friends, any more than Miles has alluded to his expulsion. Oh, yes, we may sit here and look at them, and they may show off to us there to their fill; but even while they pretend to be lost in their fairytale theyre steeped in their vision of the dead restored. Hes not reading to her, I declared; theyre talking of themtheyre talking horrors! I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and its a wonder Im not. What Ive seen would have made you so; but it has only made me more lucid, made me get hold of still other things. My lucidity must have seemed awful, but the charming creatures who were victims of it, passing and repassing in their interlocked sweetness, gave my colleague something to hold on by; and I felt how tight she held as, without stirring in the breath of my passion, she covered them still with her eyes. Of what other things have you got hold? Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, at bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. Its a game, I went on; its a policy and a fraud! On the part of little darlings? As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems! The very act of bringing it out really helped me to trace itfollow it all up and piece it all together. They havent been goodtheyve only been absent. It has been easy to live with them, because theyre simply leading a life of their own. Theyre not minetheyre not ours. Theyre his and theyre hers! Quints and that womans? Quints and that womans. They want to get to them. Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs. Grose appeared to study them! But for what? For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the work of demons, is what brings the others back. Laws! said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was homely, but it revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the bad timefor there had been a worse even than this!must have occurred. There could have been no such justification for me as the plain assent of her experience to whatever depth of depravity I found credible in our brace of scoundrels. It was in obvious submission of memory that she brought out after a moment: They were rascals! But what can they now do? she pursued. Do? I echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed at their distance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at us. Dont they do enough? I demanded in a lower tone, while the children, having smiled and nodded and kissed hands to us, resumed their exhibition. We were held by it a minute; then I answered: They can destroy them! At this my companion did turn, but the inquiry she launched was |
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