Then we ate and drank; and never was a meal so good. We seemed to have known each ether a long time, and already we had common jokes connected with our past—that past which had been the present this morning. It was after one o'clock when it occurred to us that it was bedtime; and as at last the three ladies flitted away down the dim corridor, Terry and I, watching them, saw that something flitted after.
It was the little black dog of Airole.
PART II
TOLD BY BEECHY KIDDER
VII
A CHAPTER OF CHILDISHNESS
When I waked up that morning in the old monastery at San Dalmazzo, if that's the way to call it, and especially to spell it, I really thought for a few minutes that I must be dreaming. "There's no good getting up," I thought, "for if I do I shall somnambulize, and maybe break my rather pleasing nose." Once, when I was a little girl, I fell downstairs when I was asleep, and made one of my front teeth come out. It was a front tooth, and Mamma had promised me five dollars if I'd have it pulled; so that was money in my pocket. But I haven't got any teeth to sell for five dollars now, and it's well to be careful. Accordingly I just lay still in that funny little iron bed, saying, "Beechy Kidder, is this you?"
Perhaps it was because of all those bewildering impressions the day before, or perhaps it was from having been so dead asleep that I felt exactly as if I were no relation to myself. Anyhow, that was the way I did feel, and I began to be awfully afraid I should wake up back in Denver months ago, before anything had happened, or seemed likely ever to happen.
When I thought of Mamma and myself, as we used to be, I grew almost sure that the things hadn't happened, because they didn't seem the kind of things that could possibly happen to us.
Why, I didn't even need to shut my eyes to see our Denver house, for it was so much more real than any other house I'd been in, or dreamed I'd been in since, and especially more real than that tiny, whitewashed room at the monastery with a green curtain of vines hanging over the window.