to believe otherwise. Ladies in some noble and spacious room, discoursing in cool ladyhood together, either with exquisite gravity or with silver laughter—how should they not be glad when the intruder had gone?—the loud-voiced or tongue-tied creature, all boots and hands, whose true place was in the stable. What should he do in such a room—where his very admiration could only be insult, his best attempts to be either grave or gay could only reveal unbridgeable misunderstanding? What he had called her coldness seemed now to be her patience. Whereof the memory scalded. For he loved her now. But it was all spoiled: too late to mend matters.
Suddenly the diffused light brightened and flushed. He looked up and perceived a great lady standing by a doorway in a wall. It was not Jane, not like Jane. It was larger, almost gigantic. It was not human, though it was like a woman divinely tall, part naked, part wrapped in a flame-coloured robe. Light came from it. The face was enigmatic, ruthless, he thought, inhumanly beautiful. It was opening the door for him. He did not dare disobey (“Surely,” he thought, “I must have died”) and he went in: found himself in some place of sweet smells and bright fires, with food and wine and a rich bed.
VIII
And Jane went out of the big house with the Director’s kiss upon her lips and his words in her ears, into the liquid light and supernatural warmth of the garden and across the wet lawn (birds were everywhere) and past the seesaw and the greenhouse and the piggeries, going down all the time, down to the lodge, descending the ladder of humility. First she thought of the Director, then she thought of Maleldil. Then she thought of her obedience and the setting of each foot before the other became a kind of sacrificial ceremony. And she thought of children, and of pain and death. And now she was half-way to the lodge, and thought of Mark and of all his sufferings. When she came to the lodge she was surprised to see it all dark and the door shut. As she stood at the door with one hand on the latch, a new thought came to her. How if Mark did not want her—not to-night, nor in that way, nor any time, nor in any way? How if Mark were not there, after all? A great gap—of relief or of disappointment, no one could say—was made in her mind by this thought. Still she did not move the latch. Then she noticed that the window, the bedroom window, was open. Clothes were piled on a chair inside the room so carelessly that they lay over the sill: the sleeve of a shirt—Mark’s shirt—even hung over down the outside wall. And in all this damp, too. How exactly like Mark! Obviously it was high time she went in.
The End.
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Chapter I. Lucy Looks into a Wardrobe
Chapter II. What Lucy Found There
Chapter III. Edmund and the Wardrobe
Chapter V. Back on This Side of the Door
Chapter VII. A Day with the Beavers
Chapter VIII. What Happened after Dinner
Chapter IX. In the Witch's House
Chapter X. The Spell Begins to Break
Chapter XII. Peter's First Battle
Chapter XIII. Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time
Chapter XIV. The Triumph of the Witch
Chapter XV. Deeper Magic from before the Dawn of Time
Chapter XVI. What Happened about the Statues
Chapter XVII. The Hunting of the White Stag
Chapter I
Lucy Looks into a Wardrobe
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids. They were sent to the house of an old Professor who lived in the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office. He had no wife and he lived in a very large house with a housekeeper called Mrs. Macready and three servants. (Their names were Ivy, Margaret and Betty, but they do not come into the story much.) He himself was a very old man with shaggy white hair, which grew over most of his face as well as on his head, and they liked him almost at once; but on the first evening when he came out to meet them at the front door he was so odd-looking that Lucy (who was the youngest) was a little afraid of him, and Edmund (who was the next youngest) wanted to laugh and had to keep on pretending he was blowing his nose to hide it.
As soon as they had said good night to the Professor and gone upstairs on the first night, the boys came into the girls' room and they all talked it over.
"We've fallen on our feet and no mistake," said Peter. "This is going to be perfectly splendid. That old chap will let us do anything we like."
"I think he's an old dear," said Susan.
"Oh, come off it!" said Edmund, who was tired and pretending not to be tired, which always made him bad-tempered. "Don't go on talking like that."
"Like what?" said Susan; "and anyway, it's time you were in bed."
"Trying to talk like Mother," said Edmund. "And who are you to say when I'm to go to bed? Go to bed yourself."
"Hadn't
