Presently I sat down on my narrow camp bed and tried to calm myself.  After all, what was the use of my anger or excitement?  I had come to the House of Aselzion of my own wish and will,—­and so far I had endured nothing difficult.  Apparently Aselzion was willing to receive me in his own good time—­and I had only to wait the course of events.  Gradually my blood cooled, and in a few minutes I found myself smiling at my own absurdly useless indignation.  True, I was locked up in my own room like a naughty child, but did it matter so very much?  I assured myself it did not matter at all,—­and as I accustomed my mind to this conviction I became perfectly composed and quite at home in my strange surroundings.  I took off my hat and cloak and put them by—­then I went into the bathroom and refreshed my face with delicious splashes of cold water.  The bathroom possessed a full-length mirror fitted into the wall, a fact which rather amused me, as I felt it must have been there always and could not have been put up specially for me, so that it would seem these mystic ‘Brothers’ were not without some personal vanity.  I surveyed myself in it with surprise as I took down my hair and twisted it up again more tidily, for I had expected to look fagged and tired, whereas my face presented a smiling freshness which was unexpected and astonishing to myself.  The plain black dress I wore was dusty with travel—­and I shook it as free as I could from railway grimness, feeling that it was scarcely the attire I should have chosen for an audience of Aselzion.

“However,”—­I said to myself—­“if he has me locked up like this, and gives me no chance of sending for my luggage at the inn, I can only submit and make the best of it.”

And returning from the bathroom to the bedroom, I again looked out of my lofty window across the sea.  As I did so, leaning a little over the ledge, something soft and velvety touched my hand;—­it was a red rose clambering up the turret just within my reach.  Its opening petals lifted themselves towards me like sweet lips turned up for kisses, and I was for a moment startled, for I could have sworn that no rose of any kind was there when I first looked out.  ‘One rose from all the roses in Heaven!’ Where had I heard those words?  And what did they signify?  Then—­I remembered!  Carefully and with extreme tenderness, I bent over that beautiful, appealing flower: 

“I will not gather you!”—­I whispered, following the drift of my own dreaming fancy—­“If you are a message—­and I think you are I—­stay there as long as you can and talk to me!  I shall understand!”

And so for a while we made silent friends with each other till I might have said with the poet—­’The soul of the rose went into my blood.’  At any rate something keen, fine and subtle stole over my senses, moving me to an intense delight in merely being alive.  I forgot that I was in a strange place among strange men,—­I forgot that I was to all intents and purposes a prisoner—­I forgot everything except that I lived, and that life was ecstasy!