servants had not told about my not coming home, though
they were frightened, and wondered what they ought to do, so I told them
I had lost my way, but I did not let them find out the real way I had
been. I went to bed and lay awake all through the night, thinking of
what I had seen. When I came out of the narrow way, and it looked all
shining, though the air was dark, it seemed so certain, and all the way
home I was quite sure that I had seen it, and I wanted to be alone in my
room, and be glad over it all to myself, and shut my eyes and pretend it
was there, and do all the things I would have done if I had not been so
afraid. But when I shut my eyes the sight would not come, and I began to
think about my adventures all over again, and I remembered how dusky and
queer it was at the end, and I was afraid it must be all a mistake,
because it seemed impossible it could happen. It seemed like one of
nurse's tales, which I didn't really believe in, though I was frightened
at the bottom of the hollow; and the stories she told me when I was
little came back into my head, and I wondered whether it was really
there what I thought I had seen, or whether any of her tales could have
happened a long time ago. It was so queer; I lay awake there in my room
at the back of the house, and the moon was shining on the other side
towards the river, so the bright light did not fall upon the wall. And
the house was quite still. I had heard my father come upstairs, and just
after the clock struck twelve, and after the house was still and empty,
as if there was nobody alive in it. And though it was all dark and
indistinct in my room, a pale glimmering kind of light shone in through
the white blind, and once I got up and looked out, and there was a great
black shadow of the house covering the garden, looking like a prison
where men are hanged; and then beyond it was all white; and the wood
shone white with black gulfs between the trees. It was still and clear,
and there were no clouds on the sky. I wanted to think of what I had
seen but I couldn't, and I began to think of all the tales that nurse
had told me so long ago that I thought I had forgotten, but they all
came back, and mixed up with the thickets and the grey rocks and the
hollows in the earth and the secret wood, till I hardly knew what was
new and what was old, or whether it was not all dreaming. And then I
remembered that hot summer afternoon, so long ago, when nurse left me by
myself