‘Mon ami!’ she began, panting.
‘It is nothing,’ he said with a little laugh. ‘A mouse in the wainscotting. The place is alive with them. We have an hour yet before dawn.’
The lights were broken up, wavering. Some queer unreality was coming over the scene. There were voices, the murmuring of many waters in Esther’s ears. She felt like some one coming back from a great distance to the light, travelling slowly, painfully.
Then she was aware of something familiar, comforting. It was the face of the librarian—a good, strong, reassuring face, something to hold on to in the medley of her thoughts that made the world insubstantial. The room was full of grey light, beyond the one lamp which some one had thought of lighting.
‘Are you better, darling?’
It was her mother’s voice. Gradually she came to the knowledge of where she was. She was in the ladies’ reading-room. Before her was the wall of books in which there had been the door she had seen open.
‘You must have fallen asleep, darling, and been locked in,’ her mother went on, in the voice of one who speaks to some one unutterably dear, who has very nearly slipped away from love and life. ‘We were terrified not to find you at home. No one knew where you had gone to. Fortunately, Bobby thought at last of Mr. Tyrrell. He had just come back from the country by the last train. There was a business to find the person who had the keys. But⸺You are all right, darling, and we are here—Bobby and Mr. Tyrrell and I. There is a carriage waiting.’
Some days later she told Archie Tyrrell her story. Oddly enough, she had felt unable to tell it to anyone else. ‘No one is ever to hear it but you,’ she had stipulated.
‘I promise.’
She was still on her sofa. She had been rather alarmingly ill from the shock of her experience. He listened. His face was grave and gentle. He expressed no disbelief. He did not try to persuade her that her vision was hallucination. Instead, he said something for which she loved him. She had been so afraid of disbelief—of hard, practical common sense.