He was in the act of leaning over her chair, but he saw her shrink, and refrained.
"Poor old girl!" he said sympathetically. "What's the matter?"
"I don't know. It's awfully stupid of me to be like this, but I can't help it. I shall be better soon if you leave me alone."
"Nothing's happened, has it?"
"Only those silly dreams I told you about."
"Bother the dreams!" muttered the Polytechnic student.
During her illness she had had dreams, and had come to herself at intervals to find Ed or the doctor, Mrs. Hepburn or her aunt, bending over her. These kind, solicitous faces had been no more than a glimpse, and then she had gone off into the dreams again. The curious thing had been that the dreams had seemed to be her vivid waking life, and the other things—the anxious faces, the details of her dingy bedroom, the thermometer under her tongue—had been the dream. And, though she had come back to actuality, the dreams had never quite vanished. She could remember no more of them than that they had seemed to hold a high singing and jocundity, issuing from some region of haze and golden light; and they seemed to hover, ever on the point of being recaptured, yet ever eluding all her mental efforts. She was living now between reality and a vision.
She had fewer words than sensations, and it was a little pitiful to hear her vainly striving to make clear what she meant.
"It's so queer," she said. "It's like being on the edge of something—a sort of tiptoe—I can't describe it. Sometimes I could almost touch it with my hand, and then it goes away, but never quite away. It's like something just past the corner of my eye, over my shoulder, and I sit very still sometimes, trying to take it off its guard. But the moment I move my head it moves too—like this—"
Again he gave a quick start at the suddenness of her action. Very stealthily her faunish eyes had stolen sideways, and then she had swiftly turned her head.