"Do you remember the dream he related for the delectation of such as would listen?"
Then it was my turn to go white.
"You don't mean—" I began.
"I thought at the time that it sounded more like a veritable adventure than a dream; now I am sure that it was such."
"Sinclair! You do not mean that the young girl he professed himself to have surprised one moonlit night standing on the verge of the cliff, with arms upstretched and a distracted air, was a real person?"
"I do. We laughed at the time; he made it seem so tragic and preposterous. I do not feel like laughing now."
I gazed at Sinclair in horror. The music was throbbing in our ears, and the murmur of gay voices and swiftly moving feet suggested nothing but joy and hilarity. Which was the dream? This scene of seeming mirth and happy promise, or the fancies he had conjured up to rob us both of peace?
"Beaton mentioned no names," I stubbornly protested. "He did not even call the vision he encountered a woman. It was a wraith, you remember, a dream-maiden, a creature of his own imagination, born of some tragedy he had read."
"Beaton is a gentleman," was Sinclair's cold reply. "He did not wish to injure, but to warn the woman for whose benefit he told his tale."
"Warn?"