She rose from the spinning-wheel and stood in the middle of the room and looked round. She thought of an occasion when she had stood in an Indian temple and reflected that she was examining these singular old things just as calmly as she had contemplated the Hindu sanctuary.
It seemed to her as though she were standing in a mortuary chapel, where old and interesting, but foolish ideas and preposterous superstitions stared at her from the sunken faces of mummies. She felt no terror, for she knew that all that was dead and gone and could never return.
Her eyes fell on the light stain on the wall, where the portrait had hung.
“Poor Fru Lykke!” she said, aloud. “You were shut out of the temple, because your husband deceived you.”
And she lifted her arms in the air in jubilant gladness that she was born in gentler times and still lived and felt the warm blood beating in her heart.
Fru Adelheid went round the room and laughed aloud to think how easily she had broken the spell of the old room. She patted the big chairs on their stiff backs and talked kindly to them. She used to hate them; her blood had turned to ice each time she sat in them. Now they were two handsome, valuable chairs and nothing more.
She had torn the veil from the Holy of Holies. There was nothing behind it.
She ran to the window and pulled the curtain aside with a jerk.
There sat the doll ... stiff and stupid.
She laid her face on its waxen cheek and kissed it with her red mouth.