二つの魔法：ねじの回転、覆い隠された結末

Then one afternoon, on one of these walks, she stepped out of a tree plantation and looked up toward the old square tower Flora had shown her on her first day, and her blood ran cold. A man was standing on the tower platform, staring straight at her. For one wild second she thought it was the uncle, the man who had hired her, but a split second later she realized she had never seen this man before in her life. He was tall, erect, wearing no hat, his face sharp and clear in the fading golden light, and the rooks around the tower went silent all at once, as if the world had gone still. She stared back, frozen, and he slowly walked from one corner of the platform to the other, never taking his eyes off her, before stopping at the opposite corner, holding her gaze for a long moment, then turning and disappearing behind the tower wall. She stood there for what felt like hours, her mind racing—who was he? How long had he been there? How had no one else seen him?—before it grew dark and she forced herself to head back to the house.

IV

The narrator circled the house three times before heading inside, her mind reeling, but when she stepped into the bright, lamplit hall, Mrs. Grose was waiting for her, her face bright with relief, and the narrator realized immediately the housekeeper had no idea what had just happened, no notion of the stranger on the grounds. For some instinct she couldn’t name, the narrator said nothing. She made up a vague excuse about the beauty of the night and wet feet, and hurried up to her room before she could be pressed for details.

For days after, she was obsessed with the stranger. She locked herself in her room to turn the incident over in her mind, tried to sound out the servants quietly, but no one had seen anyone unusual, no one knew anything about an intruder. She decided, finally, that it must have been a rude, curious traveler who had snuck into the grounds to look at the old house, then left as quietly as he’d come. She told herself she would never see him again, that the incident was nothing to worry about, and threw herself into her work with Miles and Flora to push the fear aside. The children were such a joy, such a comfort: Miles was especially sweet, never speaking of his old school, never mentioning friends or teachers, and the narrator became more and more convinced the expulsion charge had been a cruel mistake, that he was too gentle, too good for the rough, unkind world of his old school, that the headmaster and his uncle had simply failed to see how special he was.