knew her. I loved her," the soul remembered with a thrill, like a
shooting ray of the star that was itself. "Where? Who was she? What
were we to each other?"

The dream began to take on definiteness. The soul groped back to find
its body and its lost place in the world. Not this gray limbo, but the
sad and happy, the glorious and terrible world whence it had somehow
passed.

The girl's face faded away for an instant, and the face of a man seemed
to be reflected in a blurred mirror. The eyes of the soul looked into
the man's eyes and knew them. They were his own. He was that man, or
had been. "What a dull dog you are," he heard himself say, as if he had
said it long ago, said it often, and the echo had followed him to this
twilit place beyond death. He thought the face was rather like a dog's,
an ugly mongrel dog's. The girl could not possibly care for him! Yet
some one had told him that she did care, and that she would marry him
if he asked. "I'm her mother. I ought to know!" As he heard the woman's
voice speaking the words, he saw the face that belonged to the voice:
the face of a pretty woman, young looking till the girl came near....
The girl had come now! The cream-and-rose tints of her youth made the
other face old. This was rather pathetic. He remembered that it had so
impressed him more than once. Yet he had never been able to like the
mother.

The dream was growing in distinctness. They three--he and the girl and
the woman--were in a house. It was a beautiful old house, in the
country. Outside it was black and white, with elaborate patterns of oak
on plaster. A sheet of water lay so near that the black and white front
was reflected in it, like a dream within a dream. The calm water was
asleep, and dreaming the house; and some great dark trees and clumps of
rhododendrons were dreaming also, which seemed very confusing, and made
him doubt whether there were any such soul as his, or whether after all
he were only the spirit of the water or the trees, and had never known
this girl who was walking with the ugly man. Yet it seemed to be the
ugly man's house, and he knew what the man was thinking. They were one
and the same, at all events in the dream. And though he was out of
doors with the girl, he could see every room in the house as plainly as
he could see the lake and the trees and the pink rhododendrons. He
seemed to pass through each room, one after another, because the girl
was extolling the charm of the ho