"Clara, don't encourage that fancy of yours," he gravely said, his voice taking almost a stern tone. "To be superstitious at all argues a want of common sense; but to be foolishly superstitious is a great deal worse. No reasonable being, wife of mine, would indulge that."
"What do you call being foolishly superstitious?"
"The remark you have just made--that the dream had done its office, and you should ever feel thankful for it--is an illustration. Had you gone to Guild this morning, you know quite well that we were not to have returned until Tuesday, therefore should not have been in the train to-night."
"Something might have occurred to cause us to return," she interrupted.
"Granted--for the sake of the argument. We should have travelled in a first-class carriage, as you know; and there is no first-class carriage injured."
He paused and looked at her. She could not deny anything he said, and kept silence.
"Therefore, what possible bearing that dream could have had upon the accident, or where could be the utility of the warning, which, as you declare, it conveyed to you, not to go to Guild, I cannot see."
Neither, it must be confessed, did Clara herself see it; but she did not lose her faith in the dream. Rather believed in it all the more firmly, in what her husband would have called a manner void of all reason.
The dream, as she looked at it and expressed it, had "done its work;" and she anticipated the excursion on the morrow with renewed pleasure, springing from a sense of relief.
Alas, alas! Poor short-sighted mortals that we are! The working out of the ill, shadowed forth, was only just beginning.