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She seized, stupefied, his supposition. “It’s not Miss Jessel! But it’s at the window—straight before us. It’s there—the coward horror, there for the last time!” At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled dog’s on a scent, then a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at her in a white rage, glaring vainly. “It’s he?” “Whom do you mean by ‘he’?” “Peter Quint—you devil!” His face gave its convulsed supplication. “Where?” She launched at the beast. “What does he matter now, my own?—what will he ever matter? I have you, but he has lost you for ever! There, there!” she said to Miles.
But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss she was so proud of, he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which she recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. She caught him, yes, she held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute she began to feel what it truly was that she held. They were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
I
At the foot of the staircase, in the central hall of an old English country-house called Covering End, old Chivers waited and listened. He had thought he heard her call to him from the gallery, high aloft but out of view, to which he had allowed her independent access. Droll, charming cries reached him—evident rushes and dashes of delight—and he could not but feel his heart warm at the success of a trust that might, after all, have been rash. “Oh, no, mum, there ain’t no one whatever come yet. It’s quite all right, mum—you can please yourself!” he quavered up. “‘Dear little crooked steps’? Yes, mum; please mind ’em, mum: they be cruel in the dark corners!” Once more she appealed, and once more he gossiped back. “Coming up too? Not if you’ll kindly indulge me, mum—I must be where I can watch the bell.” He dropped to a murmur of great patience as he resumed his round, and the next moment the husky plaint of the signal itself took up the burden, confessing equally to short wind and creaking joints. It moved, however, distinguishably, and its motion made him start much more as if he had been guilty of sleeping at his post. “Mercy, if I didn’t watch——!” He shuffled across the wide stone-paved hall and hastened to admit his new visitor.
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