With difficulty Violet preserved her show of composure. “The door!” she murmured to herself. “I have found it. The great historic door!” But her tone was light as she ventured to say:
“Then it can no longer be opened by your hand or any other?”
“It could not be opened with an axe.”
Violet sighed in the midst of her triumph. Her curiosity had been satisfied, but the problem she had been set to solve looked inexplicable. But she was not one to yield easily to discouragement. Marking the disappointment approaching to disdain in every eye but Mr. Upjohn’s, she drew herself up—(she had not far to draw) and made this final proposal.
“A sheet of paper,” she remarked, “of the size of this one cannot be spirited away, or dissolved into thin air. It exists; it is here; and all we want is some happy thought in order to find it. I acknowledge that that happy thought has not come to me yet, but sometimes I get it in what may seem to you a very odd way. Forgetting myself, I try to assume the individuality of the person who has worked the mystery. If I can think with his thoughts, I possibly may follow him in his actions. In this case I should like to make believe for a few moments that I am Mr. Spielhagen” (with what a delicious smile she said this) “I should like to hold his thesis in my hand and be interrupted in my reading by Mr. Cornell offering his glass of cordial; then I should like to nod and slip off mentally into a deep sleep. Possibly in that sleep the dream may come which will clarify the whole situation. Will you humour me so far?”
A ridiculous concession, but finally she had her way; the farce was enacted and they left her as she had requested them to do, alone with her dreams in the small room.
Suddenly they heard her cry out, and in another moment she appeared before them, the picture of excitement.
“Is this chair standing exactly as it did when Mr. Spielhagen occupied it?” she asked.
“No,” said Mr. Upjohn, “it faced the other way.”
She stepped back and twirled the chair about with her disengaged hand.