“Did she ask to see me?”

“No; but when I proposed your going in, she did not say no.”

I did as I was asked to do, but with some misgivings.  It was one of the few occasions when my misfortune became an advantage.  No one, especially no woman, was likely to rebuff too sharply the intruder who dragged himself into her presence.  So far from that, Mrs. Molyneux, who was leaning against the mantelpiece and looking down listlessly into the fire, moved to welcome me with a smile and to offer me a hand startlingly cold.  But after that she resumed her first attitude and made no attempt to converse—­she, the most ready, the most voluble of women.  Then followed an awkward pause, which I desperately broke by saying I was afraid she was not better.

“Better!  I was not ill,” she answered, almost impatiently, and walked away towards the other side of the room.  I understood that she wished to be alone, and was moving towards the door as quietly as possible when I was suddenly checked by her hand upon my elbow.

“Mr. Lyndsay, why are you going?  Was I rude?  I did not mean to be.  Forgive me; I am so miserable.”

“You could not be rude, I think, even if you wished to.  It is I who am inconsiderate in intruding—­”

“You are not intruding; please stay.”

“I would gladly stay if I could help you.”

“Can any one help me, I wonder?” She went slowly back to the fire and sat down upon the fender-stool, and resting her chin upon her hand, and looking dreamily before her, repeated—­

“Can any one help me, I wonder?”

I sat down on a chair near her and said—­

“Do you think it would help you to talk of what has frightened you?”

“I don’t think I can.  I would tell you, Mr. Lyndsay, if I could tell any one; for you know what it is to be weak and suffering; you are as sympathetic as a woman, and more merciful than some women.  But part of the horror of it all is that I cannot explain it.  Words seem to be no good, just because I have used them so easily and so meaninglessly all my life—­just as words and nothing more.”

“Can you tell me what you saw?”

“A face, only a face, when I woke up suddenly.  It looked as if it were painted on the darkness.  But oh, the dreadfulness of it and what it brought with it!  Do you remember the line, ’Bring with you airs from heaven or blasts from hell’?  Yes, it was in hell, because hell is not a great gulf, like Dante described, as I used to think; it is no place at all—­it is something we make ourselves.  I felt all this as I saw the face, for we ourselves are not what we think.  Part of what I used to play with was true enough; it is all Maya, a delusion, this sense—­life—­it is no life at all.  The actual life is behind, under it all; it goes deep deep down, it stretches on, on—­and yet it has nothing to do with space or time.  I feel as if I were beating myself against a stone wall.  My words can have no sense for you any more than they would have had for me yesterday.”