"Have you never thrown away your brass ring?" asked Anikin, smiling.
"I haven't got one to throw away," she said.
"Then I will send you one from London, I am going there in a day or two," he said.
"Mrs. Roseleigh was right," he said to himself, "no explanations are necessary."
Mrs. Roseleigh looked at him with approval. Kathleen Farrel seemed relieved too, as though a weight too heavy for her to bear had been lifted from her, as though after having forced herself to keep awake in an alien world and an unfamiliar sunlight, she was now allowed to go back once more to the region of dreamless limbo.
"Yes,", she said, "please send me one from London," as if there were nothing surprising or unexpected about his departure.
In truth she was relieved. The episode at Bellevue was as far away from her now as the dreams and adventure of her childhood. She felt no regret. She asked for no explanation. Anikin's words gave her no pang; nothing but a joyless relief; but it was with the slightest tinge of melancholy that she realized that she must be different from other people, and she would not have had things otherwise.
As Arkright looked at her dark hair, her haunting eyes and her listless face, he thought of the Sleeping Beauty in the wood; and wondered whether a Fairy Prince would one day awaken her to life. He did not know her full story; he did not know that she was a mortal who had trespassed in Fairyland and was now paying the penalty.
The enchanted thickets were closing round her, and the forest was taking its revenge on the intruder who had once rashly dared to violate its secrecy.
He did not know that Kathleen Farrel had in more senses than one been overlooked.