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 some time; the night had brought a touch of frost, and the autumn air, bright and sharp, made the church bells almost gay. It was an odd accident of thought that I should have happened at such a moment to be particularly and very gratefully struck with the obedience of my little charges.
Why did they never resent my inexorable, my perpetual society?
Something or other had brought nearer home to me that I had all but pinned the boy to my shawl and that, in the way our companions were marshaled before me, I might have appeared to provide against some danger of rebellion.
I was like a gaoler with an eye to possible surprises and escapes.
But all this belonged--I mean their magnificent little surrender-- just to the special array of the facts that were most abysmal.
Turned out for Sunday by his uncle's tailor, who had had a free hand and a notion of pretty waistcoats and of his grand little air, Miles's whole title to independence, the rights of his sex and situation, were so stamped upon him that if he had suddenly struck for freedom I should have had nothing to say. I was by the strangest of chances wondering how I should meet him when the revolution unmistakably occurred.
I call it a revolution because I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama, and the catastrophe was precipitated. "Look here, my dear, you know," he charmingly said, "when in the world, please, am I going back to school?"
Transcribed here the speech sounds harmless enough, particularly as uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all interlocutors, but above all at his eternal governess, he threw off intonations as if he were tossing roses.
There was something in them that always made one "catch," and I caught, at any rate, now so effectually that I stopped as short as if one of the trees of the park had fallen across the road.
There was something new, on the spot, between us, and he was perfectly aware that I recognized it, though, to enable me to do so, he had no need to look a whit less candid and charming than usual.
I could feel in him how he already, from my at first finding nothing to reply, perceived the advantage he had gained.
I was so slow to find anything that he had plenty of time, after a minute, to continue with his suggestive but inconclusive smile:
"You know, my dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady ALWAYS--!"
His "my dear" was constantly on his lips for me, and nothing could have expressed more the exact shade of the sentiment with which I desired to inspire my pupils than its fond familiarity.
It was so respectfully easy.
But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases!
I remember that, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see in the beautiful face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I looked.
"And always with the same lady?" I returned.
He neither blanched nor winked. The whole thing was virtually out between us. "Ah, of course, she's a jolly, `perfect' lady; but, after all, I'm a fellow, don't you see? that's--well, getting on."
I lingered there with him an instant ever so kindly.
"Yes, you're getting on." Oh, but I felt helpless!
I have kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed to know that and to play with it.
"And you can't say I've not been awfully good, can you?"