ase don't touch me just now," she said.

He was in the act of leaning over her chair, but he saw her shrink, and
refrained.

"Poor old girl!" he said sympathetically. "What's the matter?"

"I don't know. It's awfully stupid of me to be like this, but I can't
help it. I shall be better soon if you leave me alone."

"Nothing's happened, has it?"

"Only those silly dreams I told you about."

"Bother the dreams!" muttered the Polytechnic student.

During her illness she had had dreams, and had come to herself at
intervals to find Ed or the doctor, Mrs. Hepburn or her aunt, bending
over her. These kind, solicitous faces had been no more than a glimpse,
and then she had gone off into the dreams again. The curious thing had
been that the dreams had seemed to be her vivid waking life, and the
other things--the anxious faces, the details of her dingy bedroom, the
thermometer under her tongue--had been the dream. And, though she had
come back to actuality, the dreams had never quite vanished. She could
remember no more of them than that they had seemed to hold a high singing
and jocundity, issuing from some region of haze and golden light; and
they seemed to hover, ever on the point of being recaptured, yet ever
eluding all her mental efforts. She was living now between reality and a
vision.

She had fewer words than sensations, and it was a little pitiful to hear
her vainly striving to make clear what she meant.

"It's so queer," she said. "It's like being on the edge of something--a
sort of tiptoe--I can't describe it. Sometimes I could almost touch it
with my hand, and then it goes away, but never quite away. It's like
something just past the corner of my eye, over my shoulder, and I sit
very still sometimes, trying to take it off its guard. But the moment I
move my head it moves too--like this--"

Again he gave a quick start at the suddenness of her action. Very
stealthily her faunish eyes had stolen sideways, and then she had swiftly
turned her head.

"Here, I say, don't, Bessie!" he cried nervously. "You look awfully
uncanny when you do that! You're brooding," he continued, "that's what
you're doing, brooding. You're getting into a low state. You want bucking
up. I don't think I shall go to the Polytec. to-night; I shall stay and
cheer you up. You know, I really don't think you're making an effort,
darling."

His last words seemed to strike her. They seemed to fit in with something
of which she too was consci