And the woman mused amazedly: "These were day-dreams of my own."
The disc became obscured, as if their eyes were blurred mistily.
The woman gulped down something: and the man clenched his teeth.
There was a sudden exquisite clarity in the pictures. They were looking at a cluster of white-washed cottages, with tall thatched roofs and with great stone chimneys: a lonely little hamlet drowsing in the sun. White-winged ducks were quacking in the roadway, a grey-coated donkey was grazing beside a hedge, and the threadlets of smoke, that mounted lazily above the roofs, rose up into a sky of the most exquisite purity, spacious, high, and cloudlessly blue. And again there was only one scene for them both.
"My God, that is where I was born!" groaned the man.
"That's my mother's cottage!" sobbed the woman, and wept aloud.
Then came rural scenes of almost every character, with a lad and a girl moving flittingly through them—laughing and kissing in the lanes among the brambles, drifting together everywhere, sweethearting through it all.
"Are you Nelly King, then?" asked the man, hoarsely.
"And you . . . you are Stephen Laity, are you not?"
"If we could both die here and now!" cried the man.