"We must go now." And we followed him
obediently to the Ivory Door, which he threw open, and signed to me to
go through first.
"You're coming too, aren't you?" I said to Sylvie.
"Yes," she said: "but you won't see us after you've gone through."
"But suppose I wait for you outside?" I asked, as I stepped through the
doorway.
"In that case," said Sylvie, "I think the potato would be quite
justified in asking your weight. I can quite imagine a really superior
kidney-potato declining to argue with any one under fifteen stone!"
With a great effort I recovered the thread of my thoughts.
"We lapse very quickly into nonsense!" I said.
CHAPTER 22.
CROSSING THE LINE.
"Let us lapse back again," said Lady Muriel. "Take another cup of tea?
I hope that's sound common sense?"
"And all that strange adventure," I thought, "has occupied the space of
a single comma in Lady Muriel's speech! A single comma, for which
grammarians tell us to 'count one'!" (I felt no doubt that the
Professor had kindly put back the time for me, to the exact point at
which I had gone to sleep.)
When, a few minutes afterwards, we left the house, Arthur's first
remark was certainly a strange one. "We've been there just twenty
minutes," he said, "and I've done nothing but listen to you and Lady
Muriel talking: and yet, somehow, I feel exactly as if I had been
talking with her for an hour at least!"
And so he had been, I felt no doubt: only, as the time had been put
back to the beginning of the tete-a-tete he referred to, the whole of
it had passed into oblivion, if not into nothingness! But I valued my
own reputation for sanity too highly to venture on explaining to him
what had happened.
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