id."

"Considering that he never saw you that isn't so surprising," I
interrupted. "I think Mr. Campbell would have another cup of coffee if
you urged him. Susanna, take Mr. Campbell's cup."

Jim declined the coffee; said he hadn't finished his first cup yet. I
knew that, of course, but I was trying to head off Hephzy. She refused
to be headed, just then.

"But I knew HIM," she went on. "He looked just the same as he has when
I've seen him before--in the other dreams, you know. The very image of
his mother. Isn't it wonderful, Hosy!"

"Yes; but don't resurrect the family skeletons, Hephzy. Mr. Campbell
isn't interested in anatomy."

"Skeletons! I don't know what you're talkin' about. He wasn't a
skeleton. I saw him just as plain! And I said to myself, 'It's little
Frank!' Now what do you suppose he came to me for? What do you suppose
it means? It means somethin', I know that."

"Means that you weren't sleeping well, probably," I answered. "Jim,
here, will dream of cross-seas and the Point Rip to-night, I have no
doubt."

Jim promptly declared that if he thought that likely he shouldn't mind
so much. What he feared most was a nightmare session with an author.

Hephzibah was interested at once. "Oh, do you dream about authors, Mr.
Campbell?" she demanded. "I presume likely you do, they're so mixed up
with your business. Do your dreams ever come true?"

"Not often," was the solemn reply. "Most of my dream-authors are
rational and almost human."

Hephzy, of course, did not understand this, but it did have the effect
for which I had been striving, that of driving "Little Frank" from her
mind for the time.

"I don't care," she declared, "I s'pose it's awful foolish and silly of
me, but it does seem sometimes as if there was somethin' in dreams, some
kind of dreams. Hosy laughs at me and maybe I ought to laugh at myself,
but some dreams come true, or awfully near to true; now don't they.
Angeline Phinney was in here the other day and she was tellin' about her
second cousin that was--he's dead now--Abednego Small. He was constable
here in Bayport for years; everybody called him 'Uncle Bedny.' Uncle
Bedny had been keepin' company with a woman named Dimick--Josiah
Dimick's niece--lots younger than he, she was. He'd been thinkin' of
marryin' her, so Angie said, but his folks had been talkin' to him,
tellin' him he was too old to take such a young woman for his third
wife, so he had made up his mind to throw her over,