“You don’t believe in dreams, for example?”
“That’s another question,” said Thrush, his spectacles twinkling to colossal rubies as he sipped his Santenay. “Why do you ask?”
“If you’re a disbeliever it’s no use my telling you.”
“Perhaps I’m neither one thing nor the other.”
“Have you ever known a mystery solved through a dream?”
“I’ve heard of one,” said Thrush, with a significant stress upon the verb; “that’s the famous old murder in the Red Barn a hundred years ago. The victim’s mother dreamed three nights running that her missing daughter was buried in the Red Barn, and there she was all the time. There may have been other cases.”
“Cases in which a parent has dreamt of an absent child, at the very time at which something terrible has happened to that child?”
“Any amount of those.”
The father’s voice had trembled with the question. Thrush put down his glass as he gave his answer, and his spectacled eyes fixed themselves in a more attentive stare.
“Do you think they’re all coincidences?” demanded Mr. Upton hoarsely.