Then hearing someone calling she put the light low and got into bed.
Deborah, once in bed, was happy. The day was over and done; that long, half-miserable day in which you were never sure from one minute to the next whether you were going to be punished for some offence you hadn’t done. For then it was that Genius, taking the child in his arms, showed her all those pictures and scenes that she so loved.
From this earth she flew away to another just as real, where the people lived and talked like us; only not quite like the people she met every day, as Deborah’s life was bound up in the church-school walls and the poverty-stricken home.
Indeed she loved the other world far more passionately and clung to it far more faithfully than ever she loved or clung to this.
“I love to watch them and listen to them,” she used to whisper to herself. “They never bother to notice me nor try to send me away, and that is what I like.”
And watching them along with Deborah from the very earliest times was always a crowd of grown-up school-children.
“Why don’t they go away?” she used to ask herself. “No one asked them to come. They’re too inquisitive by far. But though they look in some ways like school-children they are quite grown up, and they behave far better and are far quieter than ever school-children are.”
No wonder Deborah loved this other world.
It had in it every glorious blended colour of the rainbow, and was essentially so different from the life she led herself.
Still, though she gave almost all her time, consciously or unconsciously, to this other world, she did occasionally spare some of it for thoughts upon religion.