So, could I get down to them, to the two friendly, anxious faces that peered up at me? You who have no imaginary fears, who never press the weight of all your will to weigh down eyelids that something tells you, if uplifted, would let in on the sight a something nameless, come from where you know not, made visible in midnight darkness, can never know with what a throbbing of heart I went weakly down. If I did not know that the great public opinion becomes adamant after a slight stratum of weakness, I would say what befell me when Sophie's fingers, tired with stitching, clasped mine.
Aaron and Sophie were not of the questioning order of humanity, and I was left a few moments to my own way of expressing relief, and then Aaron locked the tower as usual, and we went away. He, I noticed, put the key in his pocket, instead of delivering it to me, self-constituted its rightful owner.
"Will you give me my key?" I said, with a timid tenacity in the direction of my right.
"Not enough of the dreary, ghoul-like place yet, Anna? And to give us such an alarm upon your arrival-day!"
The key came to me, for Aaron would not keep it without good reason.
It was around the bright, cheerful tea-table that Sophie asked,--
"Why did you not come down, Anna? Did you choose staying up so late?"
"No, Sophie,"--and I looked with my clear brown eyes as fearlessly at them both as when I had listened to reason in the morning,--"I shut the door when I went up, and afterwards, when I would have come down, I felt afraid invisible hands were weaving in the blackness to seize me. I believe it would have killed me to come out, after I had been an hour up there."
"And you don't mind confessing to such cowardice?" asked Sophie, evidently slightly ashamed of me.
"I never did mind telling the truth, when it was needful to speak at all. I don't cultivate this fear,--I urge reason to conquer it; but when I have most rejoiced in going on, despite the ache of nerve and brain, after it I feel as if I had lost a part of my life, my nature doesn't unfold to sunny joys for a long time."