"Dearest one," she said, shaking him gently.
He groaned, turned over and buried his face in the pillow.
"Darling Timothy," she said, "you must wake up for just one minute. I want to tell you what happened at the meeting this evening."
She shook him again, not so gently as at first, and he opened his eyes.
"The whole village," she said, "was wildly enthusiastic about the pageant, and James Hinton has promised fifty pounds."
The vicar heard her and was almost startled into complete wakefulness. But the mind, though it works erratically, does work during the interval of half consciousness between waking and sleeping. What Mrs. Eames said was entirely incredible. The vicar took it for granted that she could not really have said it. He was, he supposed, dreaming a dream rather more absurd than most dreams are.
"Yes, yes," he murmured, "how nice."
This seemed to him, still reasoning confusedly, a very good answer to make to a dream statement of a particularly foolish kind. It was not an answer which satisfied Mrs. Eames. She repeated, in much louder tones, her news about the village people. She added details about the meeting and described the extraordinary enthusiasm of the audience. This time the vicar was almost convinced he was awake and tried to make up his mind to sit up and ask questions. But Mrs. Eames repeated the statement about James Hinton's fifty pounds and the vicar's reason reasserted itself. It could not be true that James Hinton had promised fifty pounds to a pageant. If he seemed to hear his wife saying such a thing it was plain that he was still asleep and dreaming. With a view to getting rid of what threatened to become a nightmare he murmured again:
"How nice! How very, very nice!"
Then he turned over again and shut his eyes firmly. Mrs. Eames gave him up after that and went down to the kitchen. Gladys, incompetent cook and unwilling housemaid, was not the listener she wanted. But Gladys would be better than no one, and would be obliged to listen to any story, however long, told by her mistress.