McTaggart pulled the rug higher about the girl as the keen wind smote them with its frosty breath. "You don't feel cold, Jill?" His blue eyes rested affectionately on the glowing face beside him.
"Not a bit! I love it." She returned to her dream. "Wasn't it annoying to wake like that?"
"Which side were you backing?" McTaggart gave a chuckle at her indignant:
"Why—you—of course! Fancy backing Stephen! I forgot to tell you, Peter. We had a real row the other night. And the worst of it is he told Mother something. He's such a sneak!—and now she's cross with me."
"Poor old girl!" McTaggart groped for her hand under the heavy rug; and the girl, contentedly, let it lie in his warm clasp with a child's confidence.
"Dreams are funny things," she went on happily, conscious of his sympathy, her eyes fixed ahead on the long line of trees fringing the country road, gaunt against the sky, warmed by the sunset hour. "D'you ever dream the same one over and over again?"
"I don't think so," said Peter. "I can't remember them—not distinctly, I mean, when I'm awake."
"I do." Jill turned to him with a far-away expression, "and there's one dream returns and seems to haunt me. A cluster of white towers that rise up on a hill against a deep blue sky and glitter in the sunshine. It's all so vivid!—I can see it now. Just that—those high white towers with a darker one among them. It seems to have a little cap—like a chimney pot—snow white ... And, although I've never been there, it's like a memory. I know it sounds absurd, but it feels"—she paused for words—"like coming home ... And then, I wake up."
"How odd! Perhaps it's part of another life. You know"—his face was thoughtful—"I think we've lived before. I can't believe that this is the whole of my existence; that all those centuries back bold no trace of me. Any more than I can think, as lots of fellows do, that we're snuffed out when we die like a row of little candles!"
"Of course not." Jill spoke with the certainty of youth—"though Heaven always sounds such a dreadfully dull place! That 'Heaven' I mean of the 'goody-goody' people, with no work to do but only eternal rest. I don't see the use of all we learn here if spiritual experience dies with the body. It's such a waste of power and so unlike Nature. Why—even the trees, you know, after centuries, turn into coal!" She drew a deep breath. "That's always so comforting! When I get the blues and feel afraid of death I like to look at the fire and believe that nothing's lost ... it all goes on, forward in the Scheme."