It was nearly three when she fairly slept, and then she had a strange dream. She thought that she was part of the great procession which never ended all day long in the streets, only sometimes a little more crowded and sometimes a little thinner. She pushed and hastened with the rest. She would have liked to stay and examine the glittering things exhibited—the gold and jewelry, the dainty cakes and delicate fruits, the gorgeous dresses in the windows—but she could not. All pushed on, and she with them; there had been no beginning of the rush, and there seemed to be no end. Faces turned round and glared at her—faces which she marked for a moment—they were the same which she had seen in the morning; faces hard and faces hungry; faces cruel and faces forbidding; faces that were bent on doing something desperate—every kind of face except a sweet face. That is a rare thing for a stranger to find in a London street. The soft sweet faces belong to the country. She wondered why they all looked at her so curiously. Perhaps because she was a stranger.
Presently there was a sort of hue and cry and everybody began running, she with them. Oddly enough, they all ran after her. Why? Was that also because she was a stranger? Only the younger men ran, but the rest looked on. The twins, however were both running among the pursuers. The women pointed and flouted at her; the older men nodded, wagged their heads, and laughed. Faster they ran and faster she fled; they distanced, she and her pursuers the crowd behind; they passed beyond the streets and into country fields, where hedges took the place of the brilliant windows; they were somehow back in the old Highgate paddock which had been so long her only outer world. The pursuers were reduced to three or four, among them, by some odd chance, the twin brethren and as one, but who she could not tell, caught up with her and laid his hand upon hers, and she could run no longer and could resist no more, but fell, not with terror at all, but rather a sense of relief and gladness, into a clutch which was like an embrace of a lover for softness and strength, she saw in front of her dead old Abraham Dyson, who clapped his hands and cried, "Well run, well won! The Coping-stone, my Phillis, of your education!"
She woke with a start, and sat up looking round the room. Her dream was so vivid that she saw the group before her very eyes in the twilight—herself, with a figure, dim and undistinguishable in the twilight, leaning over her; and a little distance off old Abraham Dyson himself, standing, as she best remembered him, upright, and with his hands upon his stick. He laughed and wagged his head and nodded it as he said: "Well run, well won, my Phillis; it is the Coping-stone!"
This was a very remarkable dream for a young lady of nineteen. Had she told it to Joseph Jagenal it might have led his thoughts into a new channel.
She rubbed her eyes, and the vision disappeared. Then she laid her head again upon the pillow, just a little frightened at her ghosts, and presently dropped off to sleep.
This time she had no more dreams; but she awoke soon after it was daybreak, being still unquiet in her new surroundings.
And now she remembered everything with a rush. She had left Highgate; she was in Carnarvon Square; she was in Mr. Joseph Jagenal's house; she had been introduced to two gentlemen, one of whom was said to have a child-like nature all aglow with the flame of genius, while the other was described as a great, a noble fellow, to know whom was a Privilege and to converse with whom was an Education.
She laughed when she thought of the pair. Like Nebuchadnezzar, she had forgotten her dream. Unlike that king, she did not care to recall it.
The past was gone. A new life was about to begin. And the April sun was shining full upon her window-blinds.
Phillis sprang from her bed and tore open the curtains with eager hand. Perhaps facing her might be the Tower of London. Perhaps the Thames, the silver Thames, with London Bridge. Perhaps St. Paul's Cathedral, "which Christopher Wren built in place of the old one destroyed by the Great Fire." Phillis's facts in history were short and decisive like the above.