everybody dies, don't they?

Everybody come back, isn't that so?

You tried to get into the locked drawer today, didn't you?

How do the dead comeback, mother?

What's the secret?

Chapter 6.

It took, of course, more than that particular passage to place us together in presence of what we now had to live with as we could.

My dreadful liability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplified.

My companion's knowledge, henceforth, a knowledge half

consternation and half compassion of that liability. There had been this evening, after the

revelation left me for an hour so prostrate, there had been for either of us no attendance on

any service, but a little service

of tears and vows, of prayers and promises, a climax to the series of mutual challenges

and pledges that had straightway ensued on our retreating together to the schoolroom

and shutting ourselves up there to have everything out.

The result of our having everything out was simply to reduce our situation to the last

rigour of its elements. She herself had seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow, and nobody

in the house but the governess was in the governess's plight. Yet she accepted, without

directly impugning my sanity, the truth, as I gave it to her, and ended by showing me on this

ground an awe-stricken tenderness. An expression of the sense of my more than questionable privilege,

of which the very breath has remained with me as that

of the sweetest of human charities.

...