ough anything!--You must go at once, and make your way to my wife's
cottage. I will remain to keep guard over her."

"Let me go to the Little Ones!" I cried.

"Beware of that, Mr. Vane. Go to my wife, and do as she tells you."

His advice did not recommend itself: why haste to encounter measureless
delay? If not to protect the children, why go at all? Alas, even now I
believed him only enough to ask him questions, not to obey him!

"Tell me first, Mr. Raven," I said, "why, of all places, you have shut
her up there! The night I ran from your house, it was immediately into
that closet!"

"The closet is no nearer our cottage, and no farther from it, than any
or every other place."

"But," I returned, hard to persuade where I could not understand, "how
is it then that, when you please, you take from that same door a whole
book where I saw and felt only a part of one? The other part, you have
just told me, stuck through into your library: when you put it again on
the shelf, will it not again stick through into that? Must not then the
two places, in which parts of the same volume can at the same moment
exist, lie close together? Or can one part of the book be in space, or
SOMEWHERE, and the other out of space, or NOWHERE?"

"I am sorry I cannot explain the thing to you," he answered; "but there
is no provision in you for understanding it. Not merely, therefore,
is the phenomenon inexplicable to you, but the very nature of it is
inapprehensible by you. Indeed I but partially apprehend it myself. At
the same time you are constantly experiencing things which you not only
do not, but cannot understand. You think you understand them, but your
understanding of them is only your being used to them, and therefore not
surprised at them. You accept them, not because you understand them,
but because you must accept them: they are there, and have unavoidable
relations with you! The fact is, no man understands anything; when he
knows he does not understand, that is his first tottering step--not
toward understanding, but toward the capability of one day
understanding. To such things as these you are not used, therefore you
do not fancy you understand them. Neither I nor any man can here help
you to understand; but I may, perhaps, help you a little to believe!"

He went to the door of the closet, gave a low whistle, and stood
listening. A moment after, I heard, or seemed to hear, a soft whir of
wings, and, looking up, saw a white do