I assured her that the man was no longer there but she only repeated, “I can’t get through the hall.  I can’t walk.  I can’t . . .”

“Well,” I said, flinging the door open and seizing her suddenly in my arms, “if you can’t walk then you shall be carried,” and I lifted her from the ground so abruptly that she could not help catching me round the neck as any child almost will do instinctively when you pick it up.

I ought really to have put those blue slippers in my pocket.  One dropped off at the bottom of the stairs as I was stepping over an unpleasant-looking mess on the marble pavement, and the other was lost a little way up the flight when, for some reason (perhaps from a sense of insecurity), she began to struggle.  Though I had an odd sense of being engaged in a sort of nursery adventure she was no child to carry.  I could just do it.  But not if she chose to struggle.  I set her down hastily and only supported her round the waist for the rest of the way.  My room, of course, was perfectly dark but I led her straight to the sofa at once and let her fall on it.  Then as if I had in sober truth rescued her from an Alpine height or an Arctic floe, I busied myself with nothing but lighting the gas and starting the fire.  I didn’t even pause to lock my door.  All the time I was aware of her presence behind me, nay, of something deeper and more my own—­of her existence itself—­of a small blue flame, blue like her eyes, flickering and clear within her frozen body.  When I turned to her she was sitting very stiff and upright, with her feet posed, hieratically on the carpet and her head emerging out of the ample fur collar, such as a gem-like flower above the rim of a dark vase.  I tore the blankets and the pillows off my bed and piled them up in readiness in a great heap on the floor near the couch.  My reason for this was that the room was large, too large for the fireplace, and the couch was nearest to the fire.  She gave no sign but one of her wistful attempts at a smile.  In a most business-like way I took the arrow out of her hair and laid it on the centre table.  The tawny mass fell loose at once about her shoulders and made her look even more desolate than before.  But there was an invincible need of gaiety in her heart.  She said funnily, looking at the arrow sparkling in the gas light: 

“Ah!  That poor philistinish ornament!”

An echo of our early days, not more innocent but so much more youthful, was in her tone; and we both, as if touched with poignant regret, looked at each other with enlightened eyes.

“Yes,” I said, “how far away all this is.  And you wouldn’t leave even that object behind when you came last in here.  Perhaps it is for that reason it haunted me—­mostly at night.  I dreamed of you sometimes as a huntress nymph gleaming white through the foliage and throwing this arrow like a dart straight at my heart.  But it never reached it.  It always fell at my feet as I woke up.  The huntress never meant to strike down that particular quarry.”