“Permit! Permit!” cried the distracted woman. “Do you think I care for permits when one of my children is locked up in a roomful of dead kings and queens and parrots? Go instantly and get the key.”
Their new friend, whose name they still did not know, now drew the old man aside and spoke to him in a low voice. Then a most remarkable change came over his aged face.
“The ladies will please follow,” he said with cringing politeness, as he selected a key on the bunch and led the way to the distant chapel where the wax figures were kept.
It was all over very quickly now, but the girls never forgot the picture their friend made when the door was opened. She was kneeling on the floor in a pale shaft of light, the only one in all that gloomy place.
“Mary, my darling,” cried poor Miss Campbell, hastening to her, “were you terribly frightened?”
Mary did not reply at first. She seemed startled by the sudden entrance of her rescuers. She told them afterward that the silence of the chapel was so deep it seemed to have entered into her very soul, and after the first few dreadful moments of her return to consciousness, when she found she had been left behind, she had not been frightened, only overwhelmed and pressed down by the weight of the vast quietude. And Mary was silent now, as her friends gathered around her and helped her to rise.
“I am quite well,” she kept repeating with a faint little smile.
“I am quite to blame,” said the English girl, taking Mary’s hand. “It was I who enticed you into this dismal place.”
“No, no,” protested Mary. “The real reason of it was because we forgot to eat lunch.”
Lunch? They had never thought of it, and immediately five American ladies became desperately weak in the knees and shaky. At least two of them turned pale at the mere suggestion that they had had no nourishment since nine that morning, and one of them, the smallest, most fragile and oldest, cried:
“What a poor excuse for a chaperone I am, that I should let my girls come to the point of starvation and never even notice it!”
“You must be very, very hungry,” said the English girl in her beautiful, cultivated voice, which made the other girls thrill every time she spoke. “It is quite tea time, now, is it not, Fräulein? I have a delightful idea,” she exclaimed impulsively. “You must have tea with me. You must all go in the car. It is just outside, and this poor dear shall not say she is starved when she visits England.”