“Yes,” she said, in her turn, “I have noticed that.  But don’t you sometimes—­sometimes”—­she knit her forehead, as if to keep her thought from escaping—­“have a feeling as if what you were doing, or saying, or seeing, had all happened before, just as it is now?”

“Oh yes; that occurs to every one.”

“But don’t you—­don’t you have hints of things, of ideas, as if you had known them, in some previous existence—­”

She stopped, and Lanfear recognized, with a kind of impatience, the experience which young people make much of when they have it, and sometimes pretend to when they have merely heard of it.  But there could be no pose or pretence in her.  He smilingly suggested: 

    “’For something is, or something seems,
      Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.’

These weird impressions are no more than that, probably.”

“Ah, I don’t believe it,” the girl said.  “They are too real for that.  They come too often, and they make me feel as if they would come more fully, some time.  If there was a life before this—­do you believe there was?—­they may be things that happened there.  Or they may be things that will happen in a life after this.  You believe in that, don’t you?”

“In a life after this, or their happening in it?”

“Well, both.”

Lanfear evaded her, partly.  “They could be premonitions, prophecies, of a future life, as easily as fragmentary records of a past life.  I suppose we do not begin to be immortal merely after death.”

“No.”  She lingered out the word in dreamy absence, as if what they had been saying had already passed from her thought.

“But, Miss Gerald,” Lanfear ventured, “have these impressions of yours grown more definite—­fuller, as you say—­of late?”

“My impressions?” She frowned at him, as if the look of interest, more intense than usual in his eyes, annoyed her.  “I don’t know what you mean.”

Lanfear felt bound to follow up her lead, whether she wished it or not.  “A good third of our lives here is passed in sleep.  I’m not always sure that we are right in treating the mental—­for certainly they are mental—­experiences of that time as altogether trivial, or insignificant.”

She seemed to understand now, and she protested:  “But I don’t mean dreams.  I mean things that really happened, or that really will happen.”

“Like something you can give me an instance of?  Are they painful things, or pleasant, mostly?”

She hesitated.  “They are things that you know happen to other people, but you can’t believe would ever happen to you.”

“Do they come when you are just drowsing, or just waking from a drowse?”

“They are not dreams,” she said, almost with vexation.

“Yes, yes, I understand,” he hesitated to retrieve himself.  “But I have had floating illusions, just before I fell asleep, or when I was sensible of not being quite awake, which seemed to differ from dreams.  They were not so dramatic, but they were more pictorial; they were more visual than the things in dreams.”