Each night and morning tears filled the place of prayers, since father was gone, and along with him everything worth living for, and the remembrance of his misery remained alone.
These terrible dreams went on for months—horrible, hateful things, like some refined torture, holding the brightness of hope for one minute only to supplant it the next by the blackness of despair.
Deborah always believed that he had really come, as sometimes he would take her hand and smile and say, “I have really come this time, it is now no dream at all,” and she would awake happy, only to get up miserable.
At last there came another quite different dream, one whose beauty and reality was like cool, healing balm to hot suffering.
She had been walking in a straggling village street, filled with small houses and everyday people. There had been no aim about this walk; she remembered stopping to talk to some persons by the way and looking in a little sweet-shop window at some large pink sweets marked four-a-penny.
In the midst of all this triviality there had come a dreamy, far-off voice which said, “Follow me on to the end—follow me to the end.” Thereupon, looking onwards, she saw at the end of the street a narrow gateway.
“I expect that’s the end,” she said idly, and walked on slowly, not thinking much about it. But when she came to the gate it led into a silent wood, and somehow the silence spoke so loudly that she was constrained to go in.
A path led onward—a narrow, ragged path shaded with heavy trees.
Onward she went, on, on, and ever as she went the path grew wilder, lonelier, and the great branching avenues and trees more grand.
It was a hard and weary road to tread, and at last her feet began to grow very tired from the rough stones and the long way she had come.