"Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were `great friends'?"

"Oh, it wasn't HIM!" Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared.
"It was Quint's own fancy. To play with him, I mean--
to spoil him." She paused a moment; then she added:
"Quint was much too free."

This gave me, straight from my vision of his face--SUCH a face!--
a sudden sickness of disgust. "Too free with MY boy?"

"Too free with everyone!"

I forbore, for the moment, to analyze this description further than
by the reflection that a part of it applied to several of the members
of the household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still
of our small colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension,
in the lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation
of scullions, had ever, within anyone's memory attached to the kind
old place. It had neither bad name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose,
most apparently, only desired to cling to me and to quake in silence.
I even put her, the very last thing of all, to the test. It was when,
at midnight, she had her hand on the schoolroom door to take leave.
"I have it from you then--for it's of great importance--that he was
definitely and admittedly bad?"

"Oh, not admittedly. _I_ knew it--but the master didn't."

"And you never told him?"