In the growing dusk the corners of it were quite dark. It seemed bare, half-furnished—some books in a case, a matting, a flat littered table, a few chairs. She grasped at the sides of the open door, for the room seemed to darken and lighten alternately, and be so full of meaning as to be ghostly, seeing that no one sat at the littered table, or was even hiding, crouching in the darkened corners. The large square windows seemed to look inward rather than outward, as if the centre of interest were within, and everything outside were meaningless. Yet the room was empty.
She gave a little moan of disappointment and helplessness. He must be hiding and suffering somewhere. She must protect him from the cruel, clattering noises and tongues outside! the dull, selfish, heartless people outside, to whom the prophet and martyr was forever coming and forever rejected, wounded by blind accidents, by people blind as accidents! So pitiful! so intolerable! So strange that the room should be empty of Aidee, and yet full of him! She could fancy him there, pacing the yellow matting, staring at the window, thinking, thinking.
She turned back from the half-lit room to the darkened hallway, and saw that another door opened out of it at the end furthest from the door on the street. Wherever it led, he might be there.
She opened it bravely, and saw only a little corridor, crooking suddenly to the left and even darker than the outer hallway. She felt her way along the plastered wall to the corner, and beyond that in the darkness felt the panels of a final door. She opened it, half expecting a closet or cellar stair, and almost cried out, for the great, dim, glowing, glimmering space of the Assembly Hall was before her, with its windows now turning grey from the outer twilight; but its vaulted roof, its pillars and curved galleries of brown oak could be distinguished, its ranged tiers of seats, its wide, curved, carpeted platform, its high bulk of gilded organ pipes. She had seen it before only when the tiers of seats had been packed with people, when Aidee had filled the remaining space with his presence, his purposes, and his torrent of speech; when the organ had played before and after, ushering in and following the Preacher with its rolling music; when great thoughts and sounds, and multitudes of staring and listening people had been there, where now it was so empty, so lonely and still. Silvery dim bars of light slanted from the windows downward to the centre of the hall, and the varnished backs of the seats shone in long concentric curves. Lines of darkness lay between them; deep darkness was under the galleries; shadows clustered in the vault overhead, shadows on the platform below the organ, where stood the Preacher's high-backed seat. Aidee had given the Hall what living meaning it had. Empty, it was still haunted by his voice, haunted by his phrases.
Camilla held her breath and stared from the little dark door, across the Hall, and saw Aidee standing by one of the gallery pillars. She started forward. Aidee came slowly from under the gallery to meet her.
“Camilla!”
“Oh! Why didn't you come?”
“Come?”
“To me. I thought you would!”
He stood silently before her, and seemed absorbed and constrained.