Kneeling between her and the fire, Miss Brooke’s face seemed to glimmer out of the dark. The rooms were always full of mysterious shadows. Glancing at her, as a little flame sprang up in the grate and died away, Esther Denison had a queer illusion. The withered face was for the moment the face of a girl, soft and round and purely tinted—not so unlike the face of which she had caught a careless glimpse in the glass as she arranged her hat before coming out that morning. Then the illusion vanished. Miss Brooke woke up with a weary sigh and shivered. She was elderly and cracked-looking again. Esther stirred up the fire and went to the window, which she closed before returning to her work. Every afternoon, about five, a bright face would appear framed in the glass of the door, and there would come a sharp little tapping on the pane. Then Esther would nod, close her book, and lay it aside; gather her things together and go off home through the wet streets—they were nearly always wet that winter—with her brother, Bobby, who was a student at Trinity College. Bobby would wait, cooling his heels in the corridor, while his sister put on her outdoor things in an inner room of the ladies’ reading-room. That too had its roaring fire and deep, shabby, easy chairs. It also was walled with books. The ordinary reader, whenever she came—which was seldom—seemed unaware of the inner room which you entered by a door that simulated book-shelves, continuing the long line of books by dummy backs, painted on the door. People had occasionally been startled to see that door open. Esther would go home with her brother to the house in the suburbs and the pretty faded mother, who lamented that she had a blue-stocking for a daughter. ‘You grow old-maidish already,’ she would say. ‘Your indifference has cooled off the men your pretty face attracted. You will be old before your time, working in that fusty room at something that will never be any good to you. Men hate a blue-stocking.’ Esther only laughed. She was very fond of the pretty complaining mother with whom she had so little in common. She merely remarked that the reading-room was the most comfortable place in Dublin during these winter days. By and by, when the spring came, she would go out into the fields. It did not matter to her about men. She was only interested in them when they were grey and scholarly—except, of course, Bobby, who was her darling and always stood up for her. She had not met the young man who mattered to her. As she said it she remembered the face of the portrait in the reading-room, and her pulses quickened a little. Men like that did not live nowadays. ‘King Pandion he is dead, All his friends are lapped in lead.’