“And _your_ agony of sorrow is to count for nothing, then, sweet unselfish child!” I thought to myself. But no more was said till we had reached our friends; and Bruno was far too much engrossed, in the feast we had brought him, to take any notice of Sylvie’s unusually grave manner. “I’m afraid it’s getting rather late, Professor?” I said. “Yes, indeed,” said the Professor. “I must take you all through the Ivory Door again. You’ve stayed your full time.” “Mightn’t we stay a _little_ longer!” pleaded Sylvie. “Just _one_ minute!” added Bruno. But the Professor was unyielding. “It’s a great privilege, coming through at all,” he said. “We must go now.” And we followed him obediently to the Ivory Door, which he threw open, and signed to me to go through first. “You’re coming too, aren’t you?” I said to Sylvie. “Yes,” she said: “but you won’t see us after you’ve gone through.” “But suppose I wait for you outside?” I asked, as I stepped through the doorway. “In that case,” said Sylvie, “I think the potato would be _quite_ justified in asking _your_ weight. I can quite imagine a really _superior_ kidney-potato declining to argue with any one under _fifteen stone_!” With a great effort I recovered the thread of my thoughts. “We lapse very quickly into nonsense!” I said. CHAPTER XXII. CROSSING THE LINE. “Let us lapse back again,” said Lady Muriel. “Take another cup of tea? I hope _that’s_ sound common sense?” “And all that strange adventure,” I thought, “has occupied the space of a single comma in Lady Muriel’s speech! A single comma, for which grammarians tell us to ‘count _one_’!” (I felt no doubt that the Professor had kindly put back the time for me, to the exact point at which I had gone to sleep.) When, a few minutes afterwards, we left the house, Arthur’s first remark was certainly a strange one. “We’ve been there just _twenty minutes_,” he said, “and I’ve done nothing but listen to you and Lady Muriel talking: and yet, somehow, I feel exactly as if _I_ had been talking with her for an _hour_ at least!” And so he _had_ been, I felt no doubt: only, as the time had been put back to the beginning of the tête-à-tête he referred to, the whole of it had passed into oblivion, if not into nothingness! But I valued my own reputation for sanity too highly to venture on explaining to _him_ what had happened. For some cause, which I could not at the moment divine, Arthur was unusually grave and silent during our walk home. It could not be connected with Eric Lindon, I thought, as he had for some days been away in London: so that, having Lady Muriel almost ‘all to himself’—for _I_ was only too glad to hear those two conversing, to have any wish to intrude any remarks of my own—he _ought_, theoretically, to have been specially radiant and contented with life. “Can he have heard any bad news?” I said to myself. And, almost as if he had read my thoughts, he spoke.