‘It was wonderful to me, because the pages of that book were not pictures, you understand, but realities.’
Wallace paused gravely—looked at me doubtfully.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘I understand.’
‘They were realities—yes, they must have been; people moved and things came and went in them; my dear mother, whom I had near forgotten; then my father, stern and upright, the servants, the nursery, all the familiar things of home. Then the front door and the busy streets, with traffic to and fro. I looked and marvelled, and looked half doubtfully again into the woman’s face and turned the pages over, skipping this and that, to see more of this book and more, and so at last I came to myself hovering and hesitating outside the green door in the long white wall, and felt again the conflict and the fear.
‘“And next?” I cried, and would have turned on, but the cool hand of the grave woman delayed me.
‘“Next?” I insisted, and struggled gently with her hand, pulling up her fingers with all my childish strength, and as she yielded and the page came over she bent down upon me like a shadow and kissed my brow.
‘But the page did not show the enchanted garden, nor the panthers, nor the girl who had led me by the hand, nor the playfellows who had been so loath to let me go. It showed a long gray street in West Kensington, in that chill hour of afternoon before the lamps are lit, and I was there, a wretched little figure, weeping aloud, for all that I could do to restrain myself, and I was weeping because I could not return to my dear playfellows who had called after me, “Come back to us! Come back to us soon!” I was there. This was no page in a book, but harsh reality; that enchanted place and the restraining hand of the grave mother at whose knee I stood had gone—whither had they gone?’
He halted again, and remained for a time staring into the fire.
‘Oh! the woefulness of that return!’ he murmured.
‘Well?’ I said, after a minute or so.