“You have mentioned it already,” she said. “There is no need for me to go over the words again. Tell me one thing—when you were at the summer-house, did you wait a little on the path to the door before you went in?”
I had waited, surprised by my first view of the woman writing in my book. Having answered her to this effect, I asked what she had done or dreamed of doing at the later moment when I entered the summer-house.
“I did the strangest things,” she said, in low, wondering tones. “If you had been my brother, I could hardly have treated you more familiarly. I beckoned to you to come to me. I even laid my hand on your bosom. I spoke to you as I might have spoken to my oldest and dearest friend. I said, ‘Remember me. Come to me.’ Oh, I was so ashamed of myself when I came to my senses again, and recollected it. Was there ever such familiarity—even in a dream—between a woman and a man whom she had only once seen, and then as a perfect stranger?”
“Did you notice how long it was,” I asked, “from the time when you lay down on the bed to the time when you found yourself awake again?”
“I think I can tell you,” she replied. “It was the dinner-time of the house (as I said just now) when I went upstairs. Not long after I had come to myself I heard a church clock strike the hour. Reckoning from one time to the other, it must have been quite three hours from the time when I first lay down to the time when I got up again.”
Was the clew to the mysterious disappearance of the writing to be found here?
Looking back by the light of later discoveries, I am inclined to think that it was. In three hours the lines traced by the apparition of her had vanished. In three hours she had come to herself, and had felt ashamed of the familiar manner in which she had communicated with me in her sleeping state. While she had trusted me in the trance—trusted me because her spirit was then free to recognize my spirit—the writing had remained on the page. When her waking will counteracted the influence of her sleeping will, the writing disappeared. Is this the explanation? If it is not, where is the explanation to be found?
We walked on until we reached that part of the Canongate street in which she lodged. We stopped at the door.