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One rainy Sunday, the storm was so heavy they could not walk to church, so the narrator arranged to attend the evening service with Mrs. Grose. As she was leaving the house, she remembered she had left her gloves in the dining room, where she and the children had taken tea that morning. She turned back to fetch them, and as she crossed the threshold of the bright, empty room, she looked up at the closed ground-floor window—and froze. The stranger was there, his face pressed to the glass, staring straight into the room. He was the same man she had seen on the tower, sharp and clear in the grey afternoon light, and this time she realized something that made her stomach drop: he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking past her, into the room, at something—or someone—else.
A sudden, sharp wave of duty and courage cut through her fear. She turned and ran out of the dining room, across the terrace, around the corner of the house, but the grounds were empty, no sign of the man anywhere. She stood there for a long time, breathing hard, telling herself he was gone for good, then walked back to the dining room window and pressed her face to the glass, looking out exactly where he had stood. As she did, Mrs. Grose walked into the dining room from the hall, saw her, and froze, her face going white with shock, exactly as the narrator’s had when she saw the stranger. The narrator stood there, holding her breath, wondering what Mrs. Grose knew that she had not said, why the housekeeper was as scared of the stranger as she was.
V
The governess had gone pale—white as a sheet, by Mrs. Grose’s reckoning—when the housekeeper came hurrying around the corner of the house, flushed and breathless. Something was clearly very wrong. The governess reached for her hand and held it tightly, taking a strange comfort in the shy heave of Mrs. Grose’s surprise. She could not go to church. She had been frightened.
What Mrs. Grose had glimpsed from the dining-room window had been bad enough, but what the governess had seen just before was much worse. An extraordinary man, looking in. She had no idea who he was. Mrs. Grose gazed around the empty lawn in vain; the man was gone. The governess admitted she had seen him before, once, on the old tower—standing there and looking down at her, always at this same hour, never quite at dark. He was no gentleman, though he wore somebody’s smart clothes. He was a horror, with red curling hair, a pale long face, sharp fixed eyes, thin lips, an actor’s look. He had no hat.
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