ay we were such close friends; but to-day I
stretch out groping hands, and try in vain to touch you. Do you never
dream that you seek for people for a long time and find them at last;
and then, when you find them, you can not get near to them? Well, I feel
just like that to-day with you."

Elisabeth was silent for a moment; her thoughts were far away from
Cecil. "Yes, I know that dream well," she said slowly, "I have often had
it; but I never knew that anybody had ever had it except me." And
suddenly there came over her the memory of how, long years ago, she used
to dream that dream nearly every night. It was at the time when she was
first estranged from Christopher, and when the wound of his apparent
indifference to her was still fresh. Over and over again she used to
dream that she and Christopher were once more the friends that they had
been, but with an added tenderness that their actual intercourse had
never known. Which of us has not experienced that strange
dream-tenderness--often for the most unlikely people--which hangs about
us for days after the dream has vanished, and invests the objects of it
with an interest which their living presence never aroused? In that old
dream of Elisabeth's her affection for Christopher was so great that
when he went away she followed after him, and sought him for a long time
in vain; and when at last she found him he was no longer the same
Christopher that he used to be, but there was an impassable barrier
between them which she fruitlessly struggled to break through. The agony
of the fruitless struggle always awakened her, so that she never knew
what the end of the dream was going to be.

It was years since Elisabeth had dreamed this dream--years since she had
even remembered it--but Cecil's remark brought it all back to her, as
the scent of certain flowers brings back the memory of half-forgotten
summer days; and once again she felt herself drawn to him by that bond
of similarity which was so strong between them, and which is the most
powerfully attractive force in the world--except, perhaps, the
attractive force of contrast. It is the people who are the most like,
and the most unlike, ourselves, that we love the best; to the others we
are more or less indifferent.

"I think you are the most sympathetic person I ever met," she added.
"You have what the Psalmist would call 'an understanding heart.'"

"I think it is only you whom I understand, Miss Farringdon; and that
only b