of her, or something taking place in her head? Before her was a very
long and very narrow passage, broken up she could not tell how, and
spreading out above and on all sides to an infinite height and breadth
and distance--as if space itself were growing out of a trough. It was
brighter than her rooms had ever been--brighter than if six alabaster
lamps had been burning in them. There was a quantity of strange
streaking and mottling about it, very different from the shapes on her
walls. She was in a dream of pleasant perplexity, of delightful
bewilderment. She could not tell whether she was upon her feet or
drifting about like the firefly, driven by the pulses of an inward
bliss. But she knew little as yet of her inheritance. Unconsciously
she took one step forward from the threshold, and the girl who had
been from her very birth a troglodyte, stood in the ravishing glory of
a southern night, lit by a perfect moon--not the moon of our northern
clime, but a moon like silver glowing in a furnace--a moon one could
see to be a globe--not far off, a mere flat disc on the face of the
blue, but hanging down halfway, and looking as if one could see all
round it by a mere bending of the neck.

"It is my lamp!" she said, and stood dumb with parted lips. She looked
and felt as if she had been standing there in silent ecstasy from the
beginning.

"No, it is not my lamp," she said after a while; "it is the mother of
all the lamps."

And with that she fell on her knees, and spread out her hands to the
moon. She could not in the least have told what was in her mind, but
the action was in reality just a begging of the moon to be what she
was--that precise incredible splendour hung in the far-off roof, that