She wouldn’t dare . . . would she?

But then again, how could she not?

J.K. Rowling has maintained a discreet silence, and as of yesterday, the secret still had not leaked out: Will she kill off Harry Potter?

Rowling has revealed that two of her main characters will die in her final Harry Potter book, The Deathly Hallows, which no one is supposed to see until it goes on sale Friday night at midnight. But which ones? And if one of them is Harry — the reluctant hero with whom millions of impressionable young people have agonized and exulted through six previous books — how will it affect them?

Heather Servaty-Seib, a counseling psychologist and assistant professor of educational studies at Purdue University, expects double trouble:

“We grieve for things that we are attached to, and children, in particular, have gotten attached to these characters,” she said in a statement prepared for the media. “Readers will grieve for characters who die and that this is the last book. Parents should realize the end of the series is an added factor in how their child might react.”

“There’s probably nothing terrible to worry about,” counters veteran child psychologist Lewis Lipsitt of Providence, an emeritus professor of psychology at Brown and chairman of the board of RI Kids Count. Most kids are tougher than most adults think they are, he said in an interview last week.

“They are terribly resilient, as a matter of fact.

“Kids will simply ask questions. And whether they ask questions or not, one hopes they will discuss what they’re reading with their parents, so their parents will be able to point out that writers write about all sorts of things, and sometimes they’re talking about terrible things that happen to people. And it’s not a bad idea to talk about such things, because that’s the reality that kids are going to be faced with when they grow up. There are always going to be people who are threatening their lives, including some of the politicians that they’ll be citizens working with.”

Servaty-Seib agrees, and says the Harry Potter series, in which death is a persistent theme, has been a good tool for teaching children about the emotions surrounding it. Earlier books dealt with Harry’s remorse over the death of his parents and other characters.

“Parents need to talk with their children,” she says. “I encourage parents to start the conversation before children start reading the book. It is not as much about the content of these discussions, but rather about communicating an attitude of openness. Start by asking your children what they have heard about the book and also perhaps about what the title, which mentions death, means to them.

“Children are curious about death at a very young age. It’s like birth, growth, aging and other aspects of human development,” she says. “It’s something children need to know about.” And parents ought to confront it head-on, she says, using the words death, dying and dead rather than euphemisms, which children find confusing and therefore more frightening than straight talk.

Speculation has been running wild, meanwhile, on whether Harry would, in fact, be one of the two characters killed. Classicists argue that Harry must die:

“If you look at the tradition of the epic hero . . . there is this sort of pattern that the hero delivers people to the promised land but does not see it himself,” Lana Whited, professor of English at Ferrum College in Ferrum , Va., told the Associated Press last week, pointing out examples from King Arthur to Moses to Frodo. The AP also quoted Mary Lefkowitz, a retired classics professor at Wellesley College, who pointed out that Greek mythology has plenty of examples, like Hercules, who was killed at the height of his strength.

“There’s no long promise of happiness,” she said. “You may have brief moments of glory and then the darkness comes.”

Others argue that that might be the norm for classic tragedy and legends, but this is a children’s fantasy, after all. Harry’s death would violate the convention for that genre, which is that “the hero prevails,” children’s author Betsy Hearne told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch last week.

Author J.K. Rowling isn’t talking, but a prophecy in her fifth book in the series, The Order of the Phoenix (now a wildly successful movie), seems to predict that either Harry or his archenemy Lord Voldemort — or both — will meet doom: “. . . Either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives.”

If she kills them both off, readers may be instantly reminded of Arthur Conan Doyle’s hero, Sherlock Holmes, who met his demise locked in a death grip with his archenemy Moriarty as both fell from the top of a high waterfall in Switzerland.

Doyle thought he was finished with his hero at last, but so great was the outcry from Holmes fans that he had to resurrect him.

Driggs@projo.com