“Never mind. There’s something wicked in it.”
“What? Do tell me! Oh, I should love to see!”
“There’s nothing to see. Let it alone, can’t you?”
“You’re a coward. I’ll get the sleepy boy to show me.”
“Come along then,” I said, and, seizing her hand, dragged her roughly indoors.
We crossed a dark passage, and, pushing back a heavy door of ancient timber, stood on the threshold of the room of silence. It was not in nature’s meaning that the name was bestowed, for, entering, the full voice of the wheel broke upon one with a grinding fury that shook the moldering boards of the floor.
“Well,” I whispered, “have you seen enough?”
“I see nothing,” she cried, with a shrill, defiant laugh; “I am going in”—and before I could stop her, she had run into the middle of the room and was standing still in the bar of sunlight, with her arms outspread like wings, and her face, the lips apart, lifted with an expression on it of eager inquiry.
What happened? I can find an image only in the poison bottle of the entomologist. As some shining, flower-stained butterfly, slipped into this glass coffin, quivers, droops its wings and fades, as it were, in a moment before its capturer’s eyes, so Zyp faded before mine. Her arms dropped to her sides, her figure seemed as if its whole buoyancy were gone at a touch, her face fell to a waxen color and “Oh, take me away!” she wailed in a thin, strangled voice.
I conquered my terror, rushed to her, and, dragging her stumbling and tripping from the room, banged to the door behind us and made for the little platform once more and the open air.