“You have saved the life of her and their enemy; therefore your life belongs to her and them. The princess was on her way to destroy them, but as she crossed that stream, vengeance overtook her, and she would have died had you not come to her aid. You did; and ere now she would have been raging among the Little Ones, had she dared again cross the stream. But there was yet a way to the blessed little colony through the world of the three dimensions; only, from that, by the slaying of her former body, she had excluded herself, and except in personal contact with one belonging to it, could not re-enter it. You provided the opportunity: never, in all her long years, had she had one before. Her hand, with lightest touch, was on one or other of your muffled feet, every step as you climbed. In that little chamber, she is now watching to leave it as soon as ever she may.” “She cannot know anything about the door!--she cannot at least know how to open it!” I said; but my heart was not so confident as my words. “Hush, hush!” whispered the librarian, with uplifted hand; “she can hear through anything!--You must go at once, and make your way to my wife’s cottage. I will remain to keep guard over her.” “Let me go to the Little Ones!” I cried. “Beware of that, Mr. Vane. Go to my wife, and do as she tells you.” His advice did not recommend itself: why haste to encounter measureless delay? If not to protect the children, why go at all? Alas, even now I believed him only enough to ask him questions, not to obey him! “Tell me first, Mr. Raven,” I said, “why, of all places, you have shut her up there! The night I ran from your house, it was immediately into that closet!” “The closet is no nearer our cottage, and no farther from it, than any or every other place.” “But,” I returned, hard to persuade where I could not understand, “how is it then that, when you please, you take from that same door a whole book where I saw and felt only a part of one? The other part, you have just told me, stuck through into your library: when you put it again on the shelf, will it not again stick through into that? Must not then the two places, in which parts of the same volume can at the same moment exist, lie close together? Or can one part of the book be in space, or SOMEWHERE, and the other out of space, or NOWHERE?”