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Her face must have shown him she believed him utterly, yet her hands shook him, as if for pure tenderness, to ask why, if it was all for nothing, he had condemned her to months of torment. “What then did you do?” He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew his breath two or three times over, as if standing at the bottom of the sea. “Well—I said things.” “Only that?” “They thought it was enough.” “To turn you out for?” “Well, I suppose I oughtn’t.” “But to whom did you say them?” “I don’t know!” “Was it to everyone?” “No; it was only to——” But he gave a sick little headshake. “I don’t remember their names.” “Were they then so many?” “No—only a few. Those I liked.”
Those he liked? She seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to her, out of her very pity, the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. For if he were innocent, what then on earth was she? Paralysed for an instant by the mere brush of the question, she let him go a little, and he turned with a deep-drawn sigh toward the clear window. “And did they repeat what you said?” “Oh, yes—they must have repeated them. To those they liked.” “And these things came round——?” “To the masters? Oh, yes!” he answered simply. “But I didn’t know they’d tell.” “The masters? They didn’t—they’ve never told. That’s why I ask you.” He turned to her again his little beautiful fevered face. “Yes, it was too bad.” “Too bad?” “What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home.”
She threw off, with homely force: “Stuff and nonsense!” But the next instant she must have sounded stern enough. “What were these things?” His sternness was all for his judge and executioner; yet it made him avert himself again, and that movement made her, with a single bound and an irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against the glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the hideous author of their woe—the white face of damnation. She felt the wildness of her leap betray her. He met it with a divination; on the perception that even now he only guessed, and that the window was still to his own eyes free, she let the impulse flame up. “No more, no more, no more!” she shrieked. “Is she here?” Miles panted, catching with his sealed eyes the direction of her words. “Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!” he cried with sudden fury.
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