ting for was come, he
hesitated to break the witchery of the spell, to disturb the unrivalled
beauty of the picture.

She turned from the window and came to him. For an instant they stood
gazing into each other's eyes, and then--the promise of the oft-pictured
meeting was fulfilled.

"Darling, darling!" she murmured in thrilling tenderness, after that
first long sweet embrace, locking her fingers in his with a grip that
was almost convulsive. "I hold you now again. I did not believe it was
in me to think so much, to suffer so much, on account of any one--any
one. Oh, Heaven! how I have suffered! One night--the night before
last--I had such a frightful dream. I dreamt you were threatened with
the most appalling danger. I could see you, and you were lying asleep
in a dim and shadowy place, and I could not warn you, could not raise my
voice, could not utter a word. Hideous shapes, horrors untold were
creeping up, crowding about you; still I could not speak. Then the
spell was broken, and I called aloud, and woke up to find myself at the
open window, and Grace standing there in the doorway looking the very
picture of scare. For I really did call out."

A strange, eerie sensation crept over her listener. What sort of power
was this--of separating soul from body during the mere ordinary
unconsciousness produced by slumber?

"And that dream of yours, if it was a dream, was literally the saving of
my life, Mona. Listen, now." And then he told exactly how he had lain
asleep in the deserted house, and how, thrilled by the startling accents
of her anguished voice in the midnight silence, the vision of her
troubled countenance, he had awakened barely in time to escape certain
death. The hour coincided exactly.

"How was I dressed?" whispered Mona, a strong awe subduing her voice, as
she gazed at him with startled eyes, and trembling somewhat.

"The vision was more or less indefinite, all but the face. Yet you were
in white, with flowing hair, as on that night when you braved everything
to try and make me forget my bruised and battered condition in sleep."

"It is--is rather awful," she whispered, with a shudder. "But in every
detail the--the picture corresponds--time, place, appearance,
everything. Oh, darling, surely your life is mine, that it has been
given me to save twice."

He was thinking the same thing. And then, running like a strand through
the entrancement of this first meeting, came the thought