How quiet and beautifully warm it was in these spacious rooms; on that thick soft carpet one might lie down and go to sleep.... If only that feeling of fear would not clutch at her throat, her brain, her temples, gripping them as in a vice. Another door flew open. Green duskiness lay beyond, like the interior of a dense forest on a summer day, and out of the dusk his figure came towards her, broad, imposing, clanking.... Her hand was taken in his and she was drawn into the green twilight. Dark walls of books rose on all sides, and from somewhere came the flash of deadly weapons, helmets, and coats of mail. She could not trust herself to look at him. Even after she had been seated some minutes in a high-backed carved oak chair, which projected over her head like a canopy, she had not given him a glance. She heard his voice, the reverberating harshness of which seemed mellowed now to the rolling notes of an organ. Nothing that she saw, felt, and heard smacked of the earth, yet neither was it heaven nor hell. It was like a terrifying phantasmagoria where human souls floated, vacillating dully between misery and happiness. At last the sense of the words he was speaking penetrated to her understanding. There was nothing at all unearthly about them; on the contrary, they dealt in a practical way with the return of his Christmas presents, which he still considered hers, and had stored in a cupboard to await her gracious acceptance. Lilly shook her head with a mechanical smile. She could not find courage to utter a protest. "And now, my dear child," he began again, "you may ask what induces me, a man getting on in years, to pursue you with all the ardour of a youthful lover?" When he said "getting on in years," she involuntarily looked up. There he sat, with the light of the green-shaded reading-lamp full upon him, with the orders on his breast giving forth a golden radiance. The silver fringes of his epaulettes quivered at every movement like small snakes. He radiated the same glory as those haloed figures of saints in churches, tricked out in their draperies of gold and brocade. Lilly's eyes dropped in shame and confusion before so much splendour.