What sort of a place it was she could not tell.  She could see nothing but a faint cold bluish light all about her.  She could not feel that any thing supported her, and yet she did not sink.  She stood for a while, perfectly calm, then sat down.  Nothing bad could happen to her—­she was so important!  And, indeed, it was but this:  she had cared only for Somebody, and now she was going to have only Somebody.  Her own choice was going to be carried a good deal farther for her than she would have knowingly carried it for herself.

After sitting a while, she wished she had something to do, but nothing came.  A little longer, and it grew wearisome.  She would see whether she could not walk out of the strange luminous dusk that surrounded her.

Walk she found she could, well enough, but walk out she could not.  On and on she went, keeping as much in a straight line as she might, but after walking until she was thoroughly tired, she found herself no nearer out of her prison than before.  She had not, indeed, advanced a single step; for, in whatever direction she tried to go, the sphere turned round and round, answering her feet accordingly.  Like a squirrel in his cage she but kept placing another spot of the cunningly suspended sphere under her feet, and she would have been still only at its lowest point after walking for ages.

At length she cried aloud; but there was no answer.  It grew dreary and drearier—­in her, that is:  outside there was no change.  Nothing was overhead, nothing under foot, nothing on either hand, but the same pale, faint, bluish glimmer.  She wept at last, then grew very angry, and then sullen; but nobody heeded whether she cried or laughed.  It was all the same to the cold unmoving twilight that rounded her.  On and on went the dreary hours—­or did they go at all?—­“no change, no pause, no hope;”—­on and on till she felt she was forgotten, and then she grew strangely still and fell asleep.

The moment she was asleep, the wise woman came, lifted her out, and laid her in her bosom; fed her with a wonderful milk, which she received without knowing it; nursed her all the night long, and, just ere she woke, laid her back in the blue sphere again.

When first she came to herself, she thought the horrors of the preceding day had been all a dream of the night.  But they soon asserted themselves as facts, for here they were!—­nothing to see but a cold blue light, and nothing to do but see it.  Oh, how slowly the hours went by!  She lost all notion of time.  If she had been told that she had been there twenty years, she would have believed it—­or twenty minutes—­it would have been all the same:  except for weariness, time was for her no more.

Another night came, and another still, during both of which the wise woman nursed and fed her.  But she knew nothing of that, and the same one dreary day seemed ever brooding over her.

All at once, on the third day, she was aware that a naked child was seated beside her.  But there was something about the child that made her shudder.  She never looked at Agnes, but sat with her chin sunk on her chest, and her eyes staring at her own toes.  She was the color of pale earth, with a pinched nose, and a mere slit in her face for a mouth.