At the hour I now speak of she had joined me, under pressure,
on the terrace, where, with the lapse of the season, the afternoon
sun was now agreeable; and we sat there together while, before us,
at a distance, but within call if we wished, the children
strolled to and fro in one of their most manageable moods.
They moved slowly, in unison, below us, over the lawn, the boy,
as they went, reading aloud from a storybook and passing
his arm round his sister to keep her quite in touch.
Mrs. Grose watched them with positive placidity; then I caught
the suppressed intellectual creak with which she conscientiously
turned to take from me a view of the back of the tapestry.
I had made her a receptacle of lurid things, but there was an odd
recognition of my superiority--my accomplishments and my function--
in her patience under my pain. 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