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 lamp. She knelt,
therefore, and searched with her hands, and bringing two large pieces
together, recognized the shape of the lamp. Therewith it flashed upon
her that the lamp was dead, that this brokenness was the death of which
she had read without understanding, that the darkness had killed the
lamp. What, then, could Falca have meant when she spoke of the lamp
_going out_? There was the lamp--dead, indeed, and so changed that she
would never have taken it for a lamp but for the shape. No, it was not
the lamp any more now it was dead, for all that made it a lamp was gone,
namely, the bright shining of it. Then it must be the shine, the light,
that had gone out! That must be what Falca meant--and it must be
somewhere in the other place in the wall. She started afresh after it,
and groped her way to the curtain.

Now she had never in her life tried to get out, and did not know how;
but instinctively she began to move her hands about over one of the
walls behind the curtain, half expecting them to go into it, as she
supposed Watho and Falca did. But the wall repelled her with inexorable
hardness, and she turned to the one opposite. In so doing she set her
foot upon an ivory die, and as it met sharply the same spot the broken
alabaster had already hurt, she fell fo