She supped in a little dining-parlor that those dead Queens had used before her. She went to bed in the tapestried room. She slept well and woke in the middle of the night with a great bell clanging in her ears. She could not sleep after that. Lights flickered before her shut eyes in the darkness.
“I did hear a step on the staircase! I did hear the shutting of a door!� she said to herself, and got out of the great bed on the daïs and put warm slippers on her white little naked feet, and threw on a dressing gown lined with unborn Persian lambskin—such a cruel idea, you know, but very fashionable. And she took her electric torch, and unlocked the door noiselessly, and stepped out boldly into the wide, dusky corridor.
She trod upon something soft, and repressed a scream. She held the light downward and picked up a man’s dogskin glove.
“Ah, now I know that I am dreaming!� she said quite cheerfully. She need not be afraid of mice or rats, because she knew that she was all the time lying in bed in the big tapestried room. As for ghosts, she wanted to see one frightfully—always had.
The door of the room that had been his was just opposite. Something made her go in, on her noiseless dream-feet, carrying the dream-glove in her hand. The dream went on quite as dreams usually do. She had gone back to the sweet old half-forgotten honeymoon time.
“This is the night on which we had tiffed, and I was the first to make it up!� She smiled and went in. It was just as she had expected. There he lay, fast asleep in the big tapestry-hung bed.
She went up to the side of it, and pulled back the curtain without waking him, and sat down, shading the light from the dear, handsome, manly face, and devouring it with famished eyes. This was what she had come seeking; some glamour of the old time; some sweet remembrance unspoiled by anything that had happened since.
The jars, the disagreements, the quarrels had never happened.... She was back in the old times, and he was not yet regretting his lost freedom, but tightening the bond a little closer every day by words and deeds of love.
This was the Lost Room, this dream-chamber where he lay. She was glad to have come down to Maryhouse for this. Who would not take a journey to find your old self and your old self’s self at the end of it, and Love lying sleeping in the shadow of dear memories, ready to be wakened with a kiss?
She stooped and gave the kiss. He started and awakened. He stared at her, and the light of the old joy leaped into his eyes.