his hand without a word and led him, through the dark spaces,
up the staircase where Quint had so hungrily hovered for him,
along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, and so to
his forsaken room.

Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered--
oh, HOW I had wondered!--if he were groping about in his
little mind for something plausible and not too grotesque.
It would tax his invention, certainly, and I felt, this time,
over his real embarrassment, a curious thrill of triumph.
It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldn't play any
longer at innocence; so how the deuce would he get out of it?
There beat in me indeed, with the passionate throb of this
question an equal dumb appeal as to how the deuce _I_ should.
I was confronted at last, as never yet, with all the risk
attached even now to sounding my own horrid note.
I remember in fact that as we pushed into his little chamber,
where the bed had not been slept in at all and the window,
uncovered to the moonlight, made the place so clear that there
was no need of striking a match--I remember how I suddenly dropped,
sank upon the edge of the bed from the force of the idea
that he must know how he really, as they say, "had" me.
He could do what he liked, with all his cleverness to help him,
so long as I should continue to defer to the old tradition
of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who
minister to superstitions and fears. He "had" me indeed,
and in a cleft stick; for who would ever absolve me, who would
consent that I should go unhung, if, by the faintest tremor
of an overture, I were the first to introduce into our perfect
intercourse an element so dire? No, no: it was useless