《两个魔法：螺丝在拧紧，覆盖结尾》

X

When she crept back to her room, the candle still burning on the table, she saw at once that Flora’s little bed was empty. Her heart clawed at her chest — and then Flora herself ducked out from behind the window-blind, rosy, barefoot, golden-curled, indignant. “You naughty: where have you been?” she demanded, as though it were the governess who had committed the offense. The child explained, with the prettiest, blithest innocence, that she had waked and found the room empty and had simply gone to the window to look for her. When the governess asked if she had seen anyone, Flora answered, almost reproachfully, with a slow little Ah, no! — and in the state of her nerves, the governess absolutely believed her small companion was lying. For a moment, the temptation to seize the child by the shoulders and wring the truth from her was almost overpowering. But she could not bring herself to do it, and the chance slipped past her. After Flora had been tucked back into bed, the governess began a long vigil of her own: nights of slipping out into the corridor, of pacing past the spot where she had met Quint, of never quite finding him again. Once, from the top of the stairs, she glimpsed a woman seated below, bowed in an attitude of woe; the figure vanished before she could descend. On another night — the eleventh after her latest encounter with Quint — she woke to find her candle extinguished and Flora once more squeezed behind the blind, peering into the night. The child was not roused by the match the governess struck, but stood absorbed, fixed upon the apparition on the lawn. The governess, her mind suddenly seized by a wild impulse, almost went straight to Miles’s room — but checked herself, fearing to alarm him. Instead she slipped into a disused corner chamber of the old tower, unbolted a shutter, and looked out. There on the lawn, far below, stood a small figure gazing up not at her but at something above her: Miles, the boy himself, out alone in the dead of night.