The little education she intended Nycteris to have, Watho gave her by
word of mouth. Not meaning she should have light enough to read by, she
never put a book in her hands. Nycteris, however, saw so much better
than Watho imagined, that the light she gave her was quite sufficient,
and she managed to coax Falca into teaching her the letters, after which
she taught herself to read, and Falca now and then brought her a child's
book. But her chief pleasure was in her instrument. Her very fingers
loved it, and would wander about over its keys like feeding sheep. She
was not unhappy. She knew nothing of the world except the tomb in which
she dwelt, and had some pleasure in everything she did. But she desired,
nevertheless, something more or different. She did not know what it was,
and the nearest she could come to expressing it to herself was--that she
wanted more room. Watho and Falca would go from her beyond the shine of
the lamp, and come again; therefore surely there must be more room
somewhere. As often as she was left alone she would fall to poring over
the colored bas-reliefs on the walls. These were intended to represent
various of the powers of Nature under allegorical similitudes, and as
nothing can be made that does not belong to the general scheme, she
could not fail at least to imagine a flicker of relationship between
some of them, and thus a shadow of the reality of things found its way
to her.
There was one thing, however, which moved and taught her more than all
the rest--the lamp, namely, that hung from the ceiling, which she always
saw alight, though she never saw the flame, only the slight condensation
toward the centre of the alabaster globe. And besides the operation of
the light itself after its kind, the indefiniteness of the globe, and
the softness of the light, giving her the feeling as if her eyes could
go in and into its whiteness, were somehow also associated with the idea
of space and room. She would sit for an hour together gazing up at the
lamp, and her heart would swell as she gazed. She would wonder what had
hurt her when she found her face wet with tears, and then would wonder
how she could have been hurt without knowing it. She never looked thus
at the lamp except when she was alone.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
[Illustration: WAITING FOR THEIR TURN.]