dropped from the ceiling to the floor with a great crash, and she felt
as if both her eyes were hard shut and both her hands over them. She
concluded that it was the darkness that had made the rumbling and the
shaking, and rushing into the room, had thrown down the lamp. She sat
trembling. The noise and the shaking ceased, but the light did not
return. The darkness had eaten it up!

Her lamp gone, the desire at once awoke to get out of her prison. She
scarcely knew what _out_ meant; out of one room into another, where
there was not even a dividing door, only an open arch, was all she
knew of the world. But suddenly she remembered that she had heard
Falca speak of the lamp _going out_: this must be what she had meant?
And if the lamp had gone out, where had it gone? Surely where Falca
went, and like her it would come again. But she could not wait. The
desire to go out grew irresistible. She must follow her beautiful
lamp! She must find it! She must see what it was about!

Now there was a curtain covering a recess in the wall, where some of
her toys and gymnastic things were kept; and from behind that curtain
Watho and Falca always appeared, and behind it they vanished. How they
came out of solid wall, she had not an idea, all up to the wall was
open space, and all beyond it seemed wall; but clearly the first and
only thing she could do, was to feel her way behind the curtain. It
was so dark that a cat could not have caught the largest of mice.
Nycteris could see better than any cat, but now her great eyes were
not of the smallest use to her. As she went she trod upon a piece of
the broken lamp. She had never worn shoes or stockings, and the
fragment, though, being of soft alabaster, it did not cut, yet hurt
her foot. She did not know what it was, but as it had not been there
before the darkness came, she suspected that it had to do with the