s they lay like corpses on the blue swelling round of the water
looking straight through infinite distance into the thin faint vapor of
the sky.

"Yes, I see what you mean."

"We might be clouds, almost, mightn't we?" with a slow following note of
laughter.

Ted looked deeper into the sky, half-closing his eyelids. It seemed
to take his body from him completely, to leave him nothing but a naked
soothed consciousness, rising and falling, a petal on a swinging bough,
in the heart of blue quietude like the quiet of an open place in a
forest empty with evening.

"Clouds," said Mrs. Severance's voice, turning the word to a sound
breathed lightly through the curled and husky gold of a forest-horn.

Through the midst of his sea-drowsiness a queer thought came to
Ted. This had happened before, in sleep perhaps, in a book he had
read--Oliver's novel, possibly, he thought and smiled. Lying alone on
a roof of blue water, and yet not lying alone, for there was that slow
warm voice that talked from time to time and came into the mind on
tiptoe like the creeping of soft-shoed, hasteless, fire. You stretched
your hands to the fire and let it warm you and soon your whole body was
warm and pleased and alive. That was when you were alive past measure,
when all of you had been made warm as a cat fed after being hungry,
and the cat arose from its warmth and went walking on velvet paws,
stretching sleek legs, sleek body, slowly and exquisitely under the
firelight, heavy with warmth, but ready at the instant signal of the
small burning thing in its mind to turn like a black butterfly and dance
a slow seeking dance with the shadows of the fire that flickered like
leaves in light wind, desirable, impalpable and wavering, never to be
quite torn down from the wall and eaten and so possessed. But there was
an odd thirsty satisfaction in trying to tear the shadows.

Fantastic. He had not been so fantastic for a long time.

"And tomorrow there's 'Mode.' And fashion-plates. _And_ Greenwich
Villagers," said the voice of Mrs. Severance. He made some reply
impatiently, disliking the sound of his own voice--hers fitted with the
dream. When had he been this before?

The Morte d'Arthur--the two with a sword between.

He sank deeper, deeper, into the glow of that imagined firelight--the
flame was cooler than water to walk through--that time he had almost
taken a turning shadow into his hand. The sword between--only here there
was no sword. If he