The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I rememb...

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town, to meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very ...

This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over with Flora to meet, as Mrs. Grose said, the little gentleman; and all the more for an incident that, presenting itself the second evening, had d...

Her thus turning her back on me was fortunately not, for my just preoccupations, a snub that could check the growth of our mutual esteem. We met, after I had brought home little Miles, more intimately...

It was not that I didn’t wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a “secret” at Bly⁠—a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in...

Oh, she let me know as soon as, round the corner of the house, she loomed again into view. “What in the name of goodness is the matter⁠—?” She was now flushed and out of breath. I said nothing till sh...

It took of course more than that particular passage to place us together in presence of what we had now to live with as we could⁠—my dreadful liability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplifi...

I got hold of Mrs. Grose as soon after this as I could; and I can give no intelligible account of how I fought out the interval. Yet I still hear myself cry as I fairly threw myself into her arms: “Th...

What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were in the matter I had put before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution to sound; so that when we met once more in the wonder of ...

I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from my consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant sight of my pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to gi...

I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect presently of understanding that when my visitor had gone, he had gone: then I returned to my room. The foremost thing I saw there by the ...

It was not till late next day that I spoke to Mrs. Grose; the rigor with which I kept my pupils in sight making it often difficult to meet her privately, and the more as we each felt the importance of...

The particular impression I had received proved in the morning light, I repeat, not quite successfully presentable to Mrs. Grose, though I reinforced it with the mention of still another remark that h...

It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as much as ever an effort beyond my strength⁠—offered, in close quarters, difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation ...

Walking to church a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at my side and his sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Grose’s, well in sight. It was a crisp, clear day, the first of its order for som...

The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed him. It was a pitiful surrender to agitation, but my being aware of this had somehow no power to restore me. I only sat there on m...

I had so perfectly expected that the return of my pupils would be marked by a demonstration that I was freshly upset at having to take into account that they were dumb about my absence. Instead of gai...

I went so far, in the evening, as to make a beginning. The weather had changed back, a great wind was abroad, and beneath the lamp, in my room, with Flora at peace beside me, I sat for a long time bef...

The next day, after lessons, Mrs. Grose found a moment to say to me quietly: “Have you written, miss?” “Yes⁠—I’ve written.” But I didn’t add⁠—for the hour⁠—that my letter, sealed and directed, was sti...

We went straight to the lake, as it was called at Bly, and I daresay rightly called, though I reflect that it may in fact have been a sheet of water less remarkable than it appeared to my untraveled e...

Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was upon us. Much as I had made of the fact that this name had never once, between us, been sounded, the quick, smitten glare with which the child...

Before a new day, in my room, had fully broken, my eyes opened to Mrs. Grose, who had come to my bedside with worse news. Flora was so markedly feverish that an illness was perhaps at hand; she had pa...

Yet it was when she had got off⁠—and I missed her on the spot⁠—that the great pinch really came. If I had counted on what it would give me to find myself alone with Miles, I speedily perceived, at lea...

“Oh, more or less.” I fancy my smile was pale. “Not absolutely. We shouldn’t like that!” I went on. “No⁠—I suppose we shouldn’t. Of course we have the others.” “We have the others⁠—we have indeed the ...

My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from something that I can describe only as a fierce split of my attention⁠—a stroke that at first, as I sprang straight up, reduced me to the mer...