"That's all right, old chap," I found myself saying, with a hand on the astonished henchman's shoulder. "Just tell Mrs. Harrowby I'm here. She'll find me in the library."
It was purely to convince Boosey, that was his name, of my right to enter that I tossed my hat on the hat-rack peg and walked to the coat-closet with my overcoat. With the same air of authority I marched into the long, dim library, where my legs began to tremble under me and my head to swim.
Perhaps because I had not yet had time to think of this room in particular, I experienced my first sensation of difficulty or unreality in getting back the old conceptions. It was not alone my head that swam, but the room. If you imagine yourself sailing through a fog and drawing an approaching ship out of the bank by sheer mental effort of your own, you will understand what I mean. In ordinary conditions you have only to watch the ship making itself more and more distinct; in my case the ship did nothing. It was as if I had to build it plank by plank and sail by sail in order to see it at all.
I could do this, even if I did it painfully. The room came into being, mistily, tremblingly, while my head ached with the effort. Taking a few steps here, there, gazing about me at haphazard, the remembered objects appeared one by one—the desks, the arm-chairs, the rows of books, the portraits, the fireplace, in which there was a slumbering fire. Over the mantelpiece hung Zuloaga's portrait of Vio, which always raised discussion wherever it was exhibited.
I had reached this point at the end of the room when a low stifled cry came from the corner by the fire.
"Oh, Billy, is this you?"
All these minutes she had been observing me, with that queer, half-choked cry as the result: "Oh, Billy, is this you?"
Vio had been sitting there watching me. Had I been able instantly to reconstruct the room I should have seen her instantly; but all these minutes she had been observing me, with that queer, half-choked cry as the result.
I cannot tell you now how long we stared at each other, she in the arm-chair, I on the hearth-rug; but once more the new brain-cells acted sluggishly I knew that this slender, picturesque creature, swathed in soft black satin, with a little white about the open throat line, was Vio, and that Vio was my wife. But I knew it as something remembered, not as an existing fact. I knew it as a ghost might know that another ghost had married him, and that they had once lived intimately side by side.