"Night after night. I was always just on the point of making you understand, but it never came off."
"Well, I dreamed of you one more time. That makes three. It was at Worthing, just before I came back to you, and I thought I was searching for you everywhere, all about this house. I told you part of it the other day—about my dreaming of the alterations in this room. But I didn't tell you how it went on. I wandered out into the garden, and presently you came to me, out of a thick mist, and your eyes were shut. You looked just as you did yesterday——"
"When I came back to you out of the mists of death!"
She gave a long sigh. "How wonderful!... Of course, I did not understand the dream, or put any meaning to it. But you were speaking as you came with your eyes shut, and you said, 'She will never come back. Are you coming? No!' ... When I awoke I knew that I must go to you at once. I knew that I had lingered too long, and that there must be no more delay. But, oh, I was afraid!—I was so desperately afraid!"
He told her of the dreadful day of her return, when he had ridden to sessions in the miserable conviction that he had lost her altogether; and how Ferris had told him of her adventures with young Rosenberg.
"I got home that night absolutely convinced that it was all over," he said.
"Ah!" She turned suddenly and clung to him of her own accord. "And yesterday I thought that all was over, too. It happened so fast; yet it seemed to take years and years. I can't tell you how many thoughts I had, while you turned round from tying up my shoe.... You knew, didn't you, that the shoe was just an excuse to coax you away from the brink of the chasm?"
"I wondered."
"Yes, I could see that you wondered, and just as I was casting about in my mind to think what I could say, I heard Joey scream!... Then all in a moment, I knew what would happen. I saw your face set ... and you looked at me, just for one second, a look that seemed to set me on fire. I could have shrieked out in my desperation, but I knew I must not say a word to stop you. I knew you would go down, and that every moment was precious.... Osbert, there, in that awful cave, in those few seconds, I grew up. I saw what might be, and I saw that I was going to lose it. I felt as if all my life I had foreseen that this was going to happen to me, and that I never would be able to tell you——"
"To tell me what?"