Graham shook his head. ‘It was not here,’ he murmured. Then suddenly gathering courage, and with his eyes half closed: ‘It was far away ... in a garden.... Oh, I can’t tell you ... I can’t, unless you help me.... It slips from me so quickly.... When I try to reach it, it fades from me, though I know it is still there ... there, somewhere’—he smiled a little timidly. ‘Do you wonder what I am talking about?... I am only trying to remember a dream—a dream I have had so often.’
‘And I have something to do with it?’
‘Oh yes; everything’—he spoke quietly, simply. ‘You were always there, you know. It belongs to you as much as it belongs to me. You have been meeting me there for years!’
There was that in his voice which made Brocklehurst, with exquisite tact, look carefully away from him. ‘I don’t quite follow you,’ he said softly. ‘I don’t think I quite know what you mean.’
‘My meaning is only that,’ Graham replied; ‘only what I have just told you.’ He paused as if trying to make it out more clearly for himself. ‘Don’t you sometimes dream?’ he asked.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Well! has it never seemed to you that there must be another world than this we are living in now?—a world outside this, I mean, but still a real world?’
‘A dreamland?’
‘Call it what you like. Yes—a dreamland. But while we are there, you know, it is the real world, there is no other.’