quite making out, as yet, where she might have entered had she
wished. She had not wished till now--such was the odd case; and
what was doubtless equally odd, besides, was that, though her
raised eyes seemed to distinguish places that must serve, from
within, and especially far aloft, as apertures and outlooks, no
door appeared to give access from her convenient garden level.
The great decorated surface had remained consistently
impenetrable and inscrutable. At present, however, to her
considering mind, it was as if she had ceased merely to circle
and to scan the elevation, ceased so vaguely, so quite helplessly
to stare and wonder: she had caught herself distinctly in the act
of pausing, then in that of lingering, and finally in that of
stepping unprecedentedly near. The thing might have been, by the
distance at which it kept her, a Mahometan mosque, with which no
base heretic could take a liberty; there so hung about it the
vision of one's putting off one's shoes to enter, and even,
verily, of one's paying with one's life if found there as an
interloper. She had not, certainly, arrived at the conception of
paying with her life for anything she might do; but it was
nevertheless quite as if she had sounded with a tap or two one of
the rare porcelain plates. She had knocked, in short--though she
could scarce have said whether for admission or for what; she had
applied her hand to a cool smooth spot and had waited to see what
would happen. Something had happened; it was as if a sound, at
her touch, after a little, had come back to her from within; a
sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted.

If this image, however, may represent our young woman's
consciousness of a recent change in her life--a change now but a
few days old--it must at the same time be observed that she both