k; in the lower shelves were Hogarth and Gillray in rare
folios; at every level and on either hand were books worth taking out.
But this was almost all that Rachel did; she took them out and put them
in again, for that was her unsettled mood. She spent some minutes over
the Swifts, but not sufficiently attracted to march off with them. The
quaint, obsolete type of the various volumes attracted her more as a
curiosity than as readable print; the coarse satires of the early
masters of caricature and cartoon did not attract her at all. Rachel's
upbringing had deprived her of the traditions, the superstitions, and
the shibboleths which are at once a strength and a weakness of the
ordinary English education; if, however, she was too much inclined to
take a world's masterpiece exactly as she found it, her taste, such as
it was, at all events was her own.

She had naturally an open mind, but it was not open now; it was full and
running over with the mysteries and the perplexities of her own
environment. Books would not take her out of herself; in them she could
not hope to find a key to any one of the problems within problems which
beset and tortured her. So she ran her hand along the dusty books,
little dreaming that the key was there all the time; so in the end, and
quite by chance, but for the fact that she was dipping into so many, she
took out the right book, and started backward with it in her hand.

The book was _The Faerie Queene_, and Rachel had extracted it in a
Gothic spirit, because she had once heard that very few living persons
had read it from end to end; since she could not become interested in
anything, she might as well be thoroughly bored. But she never opened
the volume, for in the dark slit which it left something shone like a
little new moon. Rachel put in her hand, and felt a small brass handle;
to turn and pull it was the work of her hand without a guiding thought;
but when tiers of books swung towards her with the opening door which
they hid, it was not in human nature to shut that door again without so
much as peeping in.

Rachel first peeped, then stepped, into a secret chamber as
disappointing at the first glance as such a place could possibly be. It
was deep in dust, and filled with packing-cases not half unpacked, a
lumber-room and nothing more. The door swung to with a click behind her
as Rachel stood in the midst of this uninteresting litter, and
instinctively she turned round. That instant sh