It was her mother’s voice. Gradually she came to the knowledge of where she was. She was in the ladies’ reading-room. Before her was the wall of books in which there had been the door she had seen open. ‘You must have fallen asleep, darling, and been locked in,’ her mother went on, in the voice of one who speaks to some one unutterably dear, who has very nearly slipped away from love and life. ‘We were terrified not to find you at home. No one knew where you had gone to. Fortunately, Bobby thought at last of Mr. Tyrrell. He had _just_ come back from the country by the last train. There was a business to find the person who had the keys. But⸺You are all right, darling, and we are here—Bobby and Mr. Tyrrell and I. There is a carriage waiting.’ Some days later she told Archie Tyrrell her story. Oddly enough, she had felt unable to tell it to anyone else. ‘No one is ever to hear it but you,’ she had stipulated. ‘I promise.’ She was still on her sofa. She had been rather alarmingly ill from the shock of her experience. He listened. His face was grave and gentle. He expressed no disbelief. He did not try to persuade her that her vision was hallucination. Instead, he said something for which she loved him. She had been so afraid of disbelief—of hard, practical common sense. ‘The house is his monument,’ he said, ‘his shrine, his temple. You cannot get away from him. You must not read there again: it is too lonely. They are going to close those rooms. Soon we shall have the fine new building growing up.’ ‘Ah,’ she said pitifully. ‘I am sorry. It is like turning them out. And poor Miss Brooke—what will she do?’ She had a sudden thought. ‘I believe she used to see him,’ she said. ‘She talked so oddly that I did not heed her—but now things come back to me.’ ‘I know,’ he said. ‘She thought she saw him. It began when she was quite a young girl, a student like you, and very pretty. She was always sitting there facing the portrait. It became real to her. He put her out of conceit with common men. She might have married: there was a lover—but then’⸺ ‘He was not the Beloved,’ said Esther Denison, and slipped her hand into his. Then she began to weep. He did not tell her then, not till some weeks had passed, that Miss Brooke was dead. The threat of eviction from her old quarters had killed her. She had been found in some kind of a fit in her familiar place in the ladies’ reading-room, on the very afternoon of the day that was to end with Esther’s falling asleep under the eyes of the Beloved. She was quite herself again, and within a week of her wedding-day, when he thought it safe to take her to see the alterations which were being made in the ladies’ reading-room. The portrait was gone—to the gallery across the garden. A great number of the books had been removed. The place looked disordered and unhappy—not as she had known it. This would have laid no spell on her.