ss set with strange clusters of swords, sharp-pointed and
double-edged. Tall grey trees shot up into a grey white sky; they
were coated with sharp scales, grey and toothed like the scales of a
shark's skin; and some bore yet more swords for branches, slender and
waving swords; and some, branchless, were topped with heads of curled
scimitars, the blades pointing downwards. All these scaly, spiky,
two-edged things stood out piercing and distinct against the grey; and
she knew that they were aloes and palm-trees, and that she had come to
the end of her journey and was walking in the garden of the Villa des
Palmes. And the thing she dreaded was still waiting a little way
beyond the garden, beyond the insubstantial walls; it was looking for
her, crying after her, it stretched out its arms to draw her from her
sleep.

A little twilight wind came creeping over the grey grass, it covered
her feet like water, it rose higher and higher above the sword points
of the aloes, and she sank in it and floated, floated and sank. And
now it tossed and rolled and shook the palm-trees till all their
blades rattled like steel; and beyond the wind she heard the calling
of the thing she feared, the thing that had hunted her from dream to
dream. She feared it no longer; she too was looking and crying; all
her desire was to find what she had feared; to answer it, to see it
face to face. Her body was clasped tight by the arms of the wind; yet
her yearning was so strong that she struggled with them and flung them
from her, breaking through the bonds and barriers of sleep.

Lucia was awake and accounting for her dream. The weather had changed
in the night, and a cold wind was rushing through the open window on
to her bed. She had been lying with her feet uncovered, and the
bed-clothes heaped on to her chest. She had been waked by the rattling
of a loosened lattice in the room below. She got out of bed and looked
out of the window. There was a vast movement in the sky, as if the
darkness were being visibly upheaved and rolled away westwards by the
wind. Over the garden was the dense grey blackness of an obliterated
dawn. The trees, not yet detached from the ground of night, showed
like monstrous skeletons of the whole immense body of gloom, while the
violent rocking of their branches made them one with that dark and
wandering tumult of cloud and wind.

The shaft of light no longer lay upon the lawn; Mr. Rickman's lamp
was out; therefore, she argu