Then the coldness, the strangeness, the fluttering of the light was too much for Chris. Blackness descended on him as if a hood had been dropped over his head, but before he was quite gone, he heard what he thought was Mr. Wicker's voice saying kindly:
"You will do."
CHAPTER 4
hen Chris came to himself he woke from sleep and lay for a moment without opening his eyes. He waited with his usual sense of irritation for Aunt Rachel's step at the door, and her voice saying, "Get up, Chris! You're late again!" But the step did not come, and feeling rested and hungry, Chris opened his eyes.
What was this? The high regular walls of his bedroom were not around him, nor the familiar furniture. Chris sat up, rubbing at his eyes as if this would help to clear his vision, and looked about him.
He was in a narrow bed in a small sunny room. An attic room, it would seem to be, for the walls slanted down in different sharp angles from the low ceiling to the broad wood planks of the floor. Two dormer windows projected from the room beyond the roof, making two niches in the wall across from where Chris lay, and a third window in the wall above his head showed that the room, as well as being at the top of the house, was also at a corner of it. A door was just beyond the foot of the bed; a chest of drawers and a table with a blue and white porcelain wash bowl and pitcher, stood along the farther side. Wooden pegs were placed at hand level here and there, and a rag rug in bright colors lay on the floor by the bed. The walls were white and the sunlight poured in to dash itself upon the floor and splash up the walls in irresistible gaiety. There was no doubt about it, bare though it was, it was a pleasing room, snug, clean and cheerful, and somehow well suited to a thirteen-year-old boy. Chris half smiled as he looked, leaning on one elbow, and then his smile faded as he caught sight of the chair and what it held.
The only chair in the room was laid with carefully folded clothes. But they were not Chris's clothes. Chris jumped out of bed and then looked down with a quick startled intake of his breath. He was wearing a white nightshirt, something he had never even seen before and barely heard of. The sleeves were long and cuffed, and the nightshirt fell in linen lines to his feet.