The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering EndJames, Henry
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The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End
James, Henry
Children -- Fiction; Country homes -- Fiction; Courtship -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Governesses -- Fiction; Mortgages -- Fiction
“If I didn’t--and you too; if I didn’t----!” he repeated as
if retreating for a jump, yet leaving his thought so unfinished that,
after we had come into the gate, another stop, which he imposed on me
by the pressure of his arm, had become inevitable. Mrs. Grose and Flora
had passed into the church, the other worshippers had followed, and we
were, for the minute, alone among the old, thick graves. We had paused,
on the path from the gate, by a low, oblong, tablelike tomb.
“Yes, if you didn’t----?”
He looked, while I waited, about at the graves. “Well, you know
what!” But he didn’t move, and he presently produced something
that made me drop straight down on the stone slab, as if suddenly to
rest. “Does my uncle think what _you_ think?”
I markedly rested. “How do you know what I think?”
“Ah, well, of course I don’t; for it strikes me you never tell
me. But I mean does _he_ know?”
“Know what, Miles?”
“Why, the way I’m going on.”
I perceived quickly enough that I could make, to this inquiry,
no answer that would not involve something of a sacrifice of my
employer. Yet it appeared to me that we were all, at Bly, sufficiently
sacrificed to make that venial. “I don’t think your uncle much
cares.”
Miles, on this, stood looking at me. “Then don’t you think he can
be made to?”
“In what way?”
“Why, by his coming down.”
“But who’ll get him to come down?”
“_I_ will!” the boy said with extraordinary brightness and
emphasis. He gave me another look charged with that expression and then
marched off alone into church.
XV
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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