She looked at the stone wall, and the stone wall presented a front of uncompromising blankness. She looked up and she looked down, she looked to the left and she looked to the right, she gazed at the ceiling and she gazed at the floor. Nowhere was there any sign of a catch, a knob, a spring, or a lever. There must be one, but where was it? She tapped the wall and stamped on the floor, but with no result. The door in the panelling opened from inside with an ordinary handle. She had not been close enough to Lady Heritage to see what she did to pivot the stone behind the bench on the headland. In any case, this exit might have been quite differently planned. A most dreadful sense of discouragement came over her. To have got so far, to have been, as it were, halfway to safety and Henry, and to have to turn back again! Then for the first time it occurred to her that, even if she had got out and got away, she had no money and no hat. She looked down at the maroon slippers, and pictured herself descending ticketless upon a London platform in bedroom slippers whose original colour was almost obscured by green slime. Jane wanted to laugh, and she wanted to cry. She did not know which she wanted most, but presently she found that the tears were running down her face. She kept winking them away, because it is not at all easy to climb slippery stone steps by the light of a guttering candle if your eyes keep filling with tears. The tears magnified the candle flame, and sometimes made it look like two or three little flames, which was dreadfully confusing. Jane stood still, wiped her eyes with determined energy, and then climbed up more steps and back along the way that she had come. At the headland exit she stood still, taking breath and thought. Nothing would induce her to pass that well again. She would keep to the main passage, and, horrid thought, she would have to put out her light in case Ember should suddenly emerge from the side passage. “Thinking about things makes them worse, not better,” said Jane to herself. “It’s perfectly beastly; but then it’s all perfectly beastly.” She blew out the candle and moved slowly forward. It seemed ages before she came past the opening where she had run into Henry to the foot of the steps. She went up three steps, raised her foot to take the fourth, and felt a hardly perceptible check. Instantly she drew back a shade, set her foot down beside the other, and put out a tentative, groping hand. There was a thread of cotton stretched from wall to wall at the level of her waist. If her movements had been less gentle she would have brushed through it without noticing. Then, as she stood there thinking, the thread between her fingers, something else came to her. The last yard of passage just at the stair foot had felt different—dry, gritty.