CHAPTER III

To have felt anything of the brightness of early morning here was quite out of the question. The same feeling of utter loneliness and depression that accompanied me when I fell asleep was with me when I rose. As I passed down the staircase the sight of those wretched, wizened dwarfs filled me with more gloomy thought than I had even entertained the night before.

When I reached the bottom step I saw sitting there that figure of which Plucritus had spoken laughingly as some great queen of the past. She got up as I stood there, and came and fawned upon me, rubbing against me like some pet animal.

At the first touch my immediate instinct was to recoil, for never until near contact could one fully recognise the utter degradation of such a creature. But along with this feeling came another in consideration of her past majesty and her lost humanity, and I stood still and received the caress pretty much as a sentinel on duty would have done. To those who might have a turn that way there was something distinctly humorous in this, and so evidently someone thought, for at this instant I heard a laugh, very clear and mirthful, come from down the hall I had entered. It was Vestné, coming towards us, her hands clasped behind her, and in that simplest robe which spirits wear. She was evidently not oppressed with any of the heaviness which hung round me: she looked more light and brilliant than the night before. Her head was thrown back a little to one side.

“If you knew how comical you looked,” she said, with very little malice but much amusement, “you would really try to appear more at home. This creature is perfectly harmless—as harmless as she is ugly—that’s saying a great deal. But you drew up as frigidly as if she’d been a snake, and then seemed to have the wish to unbend but not the power. Now, if you don’t like their caresses, and I can sympathise with you, as I cannot myself tolerate one of them, just kick them off. For my own