Then David was troubled in his dream, and stirred and went from her an hour before the time of his going.
Towards the end of the fortnight her trance wore thin. It was then that everything she saw or read seemed to press in upon one sore spot. If she went to the Mottisfonts’, there was Mary with her talk of Edward and the baby. Edward!—Elizabeth could have laughed; but the laughter went too. If there were not much of Edward, at least Mary had all that there was. And the child—did not she, too, desire children? But the child of a dream. How could she give to David the child of a dream already forgotten? If she walked, there were lovers in every lane, young lovers, who loved each other by day and in the eye of the sun. If she took up a book—once what she read was:
Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again!
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.
and another time, Kingsley’s Dolcino to Margaret. Then came a day when she opened her Bible and read:
“If a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him.”
That day she came broad awake. The daze passed from her. Her brain was clear, and her conscience—the inner vision rose before her, showing her an image troubled and confused. What had she done? And what was she doing now? Day by day David looked at her with the eyes of a friend, and night by night he came to her, the lover of a dream. Which was the reality? Which was the real David? If the David of the dream were real, conscious in sleep of some mysterious oneness, the sense of which was lost in the glare of day—then she could wait, and bear, and hope, till the realisation was so strong that the sun might shine upon it and show to David awake what the sleeping David knew.
But if the David of the dream were not the real David, then what was she? Mistress and no wife—the mistress of a dream mood that never touched Reality at all.