lieve in all this psycho-analysis tosh, do you?"

She hesitates. "A little, yes. Like the old woman and ghosts. I may not
believe in it but I'm afraid of it, rather."

She gives him a steady look--her eyes go deep. It is not so much the
intensity of the look as its haltingness that makes warmth go over him.

"Shall we tell our dreams--the favorite ones, I mean? Play fair if we
do, remember," she adds slowly.

"Not if you're really afraid."

"I? But it's just because I am afraid that I really should, you know.
Like going into a dark room when you don't want to."

"But they can't be as scary as _that_, surely." Ted's voice is a little
false. Both are watching each other intently now--he with a puzzled
sense of lazy enveloping firelight.

"Well, shall I begin? After all this _is_ tea in the Village."

"I should be very much interested indeed, Mrs. Severance," says Ted
rather gravely. "Check!" "How official you sound--almost as if you had
a lot of those funny little machines all the modern doctors use and were
going to mail me off to your pet sanatorium at once because you'd asked
me what green reminded me of and I said 'cheese' instead of 'trees.'
And anyhow, I never have any startling dreams--only silly ones--much too
silly to tell--"

"Please go on." Ted's voice has really become quite clinical.

"Oh very well. They don't count when you only have them once--just when
they keep coming back and back to you--isn't that it?"

"I believe so."

Mrs. Severance's eyes waver a little--her mouth seeking for the proper
kind of dream.

"It's not much but it comes quite regularly--the most punctual,
old-fashioned-servant sort of a dream.

"It doesn't begin with sleep, you know--it begins with waking. At
least it's just as if I were in my own bed in my own apartment and then
gradually I started to wake. You know how you can feel that somebody
else is in the room though you can't see them--that's the feeling.
And, of course being a normal American business woman, my first idea
is--burglars. And I'm very cowardly for a minute. Then the cowardice
passes and I decide to get up and see what it is.

"It _is_ somebody else--or something--but nobody I think that I ever
really knew. And at first I don't want to walk toward it--and then I do
because it keeps pulling me in spite of myself. So I go to it--hands out
so I won't knock over things.

"And then I touch it--or him--or her--and I'm suddenly very, very happy.

"That's