“Yes—yes; I know,” Lydia answered.
“And do you really dread getting there?”
“Yes, I dread it,” she said.
“Why,” returned Staniford lightly, “so do I; but it's for a different reason, I'm afraid. I should like such a voyage as this to go on forever. Now and then I think it will; it seems always to have gone on. Can you remember when it began?”
“A great while ago,” she answered, humoring his fantasy, “but I can remember.” She paused a long while. “I don't know,” she said at last, “whether I can make you understand just how I feel. But it seems to me as if I had died, and this long voyage was a kind of dream that I was going to wake up from in another world. I often used to think, when I was a little girl, that when I got to heaven it would be lonesome—I don't know whether I can express it. You say that Italy—that Venice—is so beautiful; but if I don't know any one there—” She stopped, as if she had gone too far.
“But you do know somebody there,” said Staniford. “Your aunt—”
“Yes,” said the girl, and looked away.
“But the people in this long dream,—you're going to let some of them appear to you there,” he suggested.
“Oh, yes,” she said, reflecting his lighter humor, “I shall want to see them, or I shall not know I am the same person, and I must be sure of myself, at least.”
“And you wouldn't like to go back to earth—to South Bradfield again?” he asked presently.