Sahwah, who was in the play and had a right to go up on the stage, which was all ready set for the first scene, ran in to see how things looked late in the afternoon.  The school was practically empty.  All the rest of the cast had gone home to get some sleep to fit them for the ordeal of the coming performance, and the teachers who had been looking at the paintings had also left.  The rest of the building was in darkness, as twilight had already fallen.  One set of lights was burning on the stage.  Sahwah had no special business on the stage, she was simply curious to see what it looked like.  Sahwah never stopped to analyze her motives for doing things.  She paused to admire the statue of Joan of Arc, standing in all the majesty of its nine-foot height.  This was the first chance she had had to examine it leisurely.  In the rehearsal the night before she had merely seen it in a general way as she whisked off and on the stage in her part.

The construction of the thing fascinated her, and she opened the door in the skirt to satisfy her curiosity about the inner workings of the miraculous halo.  She saw how the thing was done and then became interested in the inside of the statue itself.  There was plenty of room in it to conceal a person.  Just for the fun of the thing Sahwah got inside and drew the door shut after her, trying to imagine herself a fugitive hiding in there.  There were no openings in the skirt part, but up above the waist line there were various holes to admit air.  “It’s no fun hiding in a statue if you can’t see what’s going on outside,” thought Sahwah, and so she stood up straight, as in this position her eyes would come on a level with one of the holes.  She could see out without being seen herself, just as if she were looking through the face piece of a suit of armor.  The fun she got out of this sport, however, soon changed to dismay when she tried to get down again.  It had taken some squeezing to get her head into the upper space, and now she found that she was wedged securely in.  She could not move her head one particle.  What was worse, a quantity of cotton wool, which had been put inside the upper part of the body for some reason or other, was dislodged by her squeezing in and pressed against her mouth, forming an effective silencer.  Thus, while she could see out over the stage, she could not call out for help.  Her hands were pinioned down at her sides, and by standing up she had brought her knees into a narrow place so that they were wedged together and she could not attract attention by kicking.  Here was a pretty state of affairs.  The benign Maid of Orleans had Sahwah in as merciless a grip as that with which the famous Iron Maiden of medieval times crushed out the lives of its victims.