The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories

Viola imposed upon her lover but a short probation. They were married, as was becoming, with great privacy, – almost with secrecy, – in the hope perhaps, as was waggishly remarked at the time, that the late Mrs Lloyd wouldn’t hear of it.

It very soon came to be predicted that he would marry again, and there were at least a dozen young women of whom one may say that it was by no fault of theirs that, for six months after his return, the prediction did not come true.

Give us some wholesome young fellow of our own blood, who’ll play us none of these dusky old-world tricks. Painter as I am, I’ll never recommend a picturesque husband!’

In those days a young girl of decent breeding could make no advances whatever, and barely respond, indeed, to those that were made. She was expected to sit still in her chair with her eyes on the carpet, watching the spot where the mystic handkerchief should fall.

They were good sisterly friends, betwixt whom it would take more than a day for the seeds of jealousy to sprout and bear fruit; but the young girls felt that the seeds had been sown on the day that Mr Lloyd came into the house. Each made up her mind that, if she should be slighted, she would bear her grief in silence, and that no one should be any

There have been things seen and done here which leave strange influences behind! They don’t touch you, doubtless, who come of another race. But they touch me, often, in the whisper of the leaves and the odour of the mouldy soil and the blank eyes of the old statues. I can’t bear to look the statues in the face. I seem to see other strange eyes in t

Among the young men their friends and neighbours, the belle jeunesse of the Colony, there were many excellent fellows, several devoted swains, and some two or three who enjoyed the reputation of universal charmers and conquerors. But the home-bred arts and the somewhat boisterous gallantry of those honest young colonists were completely eclipsed by

It was thrown in as well, from the first moment, that I should get on with Mrs Grose in a relation over which, on my way, in the coach, I fear I had rather brooded. The one appearance indeed that in this early outlook might have made me shrink again was that of her being so inordinately glad to see me. I felt within half an hour that she was so gla

I leaned over the rail dividing the King’s Road from the beach, and I think I had smoked a cigarette, when I became conscious of an intended joke in the shape of a light walking-stick laid across my shoulders. The idea, I found, had been thrown off by Teddy Bostwick of the Rifles2 and was intended as a contribution to talk. Our talk came off as we