my lady. 'Tis only just to me that
you should hear what I must say to Father Matthieu."

And so, dear heart! she bore with me to the last; and together we
climbed the stair to come into the upper corridor with the room of
destiny at its farther end.

We came as far as the door; I mind it perfectly, for I remember marking
that the wooden bar my father had put upon it was gone, and the iron
brackets as well. But whilst I was groping for the latch there came a
taste of blood in my mouth, and I heard my dear lady's voice as if she
were calling to me across the eternal abysses. "Monsieur John!--you are
hurt!" And then, from a still remoter distance: "Oh, Father
Matthieu--Dick! come quickly! He is dying!"

LI

IN WHICH THE GOOD CAUSE GAINS A CONVERT

Which one of you, my dears, faring across the frontier of the shadow
land of dreams into the no less mysterious country of the real, can not
recall the struggle of the waking senses to knot up the gossamer
filament of the night's fantasies with the coarser web of reality?

For a time, longer or shorter as the dream thread holds, the vagaries of
the night are shuttled into the warp of life. But presently comes the
master-weaver Reason to point out this or that fantastic pattern; to bid
the ear listen to the measured clacking of the day-loom, and the eye to
mark that the web of reality has grown never an inch for all the
shuttlings of the sleeping-time. Whereupon, full-blood consciousness
regains her sway, and you sigh, gladly or sorrowfully, and say, "Dear
God, 'twas but a dream I dreamed!"

Some such awakening came to me on a day whereof I knew not the name or
its number in the calendar.

I was lying in bed in my old room at Appleby Hundred. The armored
soldier was glowering down upon me from his frame over the chimney
piece; the great blackened clothes-press loomed darkly in its corner;
the show of curious china filled the shelves where my boyhood books had
rested; and there was the same faint smell of lavender in the bed linen
that once--was it yesterday or months ago?--had minded me of my mother.

When I sought to move me on the pillows the dream seemed more than ever
dream-sure. The pain of a sword wound was grinding at my shoulder, and I
was bandaged stiff as I had been that other day.

So I said, as you have said in like awakenings, "Dear God,'twas but a
dream!" and saying it, would turn my head to see if Mistress Margery
were sitting where I last rememb