On the fourth night, the night of Thursday, the fifteenth, Lucia did not sleep so well.  She dreamed, but her dreams were too light and transparent to veil the reality that lay on the waking side of them.  Three times that night she started on her journey to Cannes, three times she missed her train, and three times she said to herself, “It’s only a dream, so of course it doesn’t matter.”  When, after prodigious efforts extending over interminable time, she found herself on Harmouth platform, shuddering in her nightgown before a whole train full of people, she was not in the least disconcerted, because of her perception of that reality behind her dream; no, not even when Mr. Rickman appeared just as she was saying to herself, “It doesn’t matter.  This is only the fifteenth and I don’t really start till the twenty-sixth.”  His presence was so transparent, so insubstantial, that it didn’t seem to matter either.  He said, “Miss ’Arden, you’ve made a miscalculation.  You must start this minute if you’re to be there in time.”  His statement seemed to her to be founded on some solid reality; but when she asked him what he was doing there, he spoilt it all by saying that as private secretary he was in charge of the expedition.  By that, and by something unnatural and absurd in his appearance, she knew that she was dreaming.  Then, for more time than she could measure, she lay watching herself dream, with a curious sense of being able to foretell and control the fantastic procession of events.

And now she was aware of something that moved with their movement, a trouble or a terror that hovered out there, not on the waking border but in the region of reality that lay on the other side.  Almost discernible behind the transparent insubstantial walls of sleep, it waited to break through them and invade her dream.  For refuge from it she plunged deeper into her dream.  She came out walking on a terrace of grey grass set with strange clusters of swords, sharp-pointed and double-edged.  Tall grey trees shot up into a grey white sky; they were coated with sharp scales, grey and toothed like the scales of a shark’s skin; and some bore yet more swords for branches, slender and waving swords; and some, branchless, were topped with heads of curled scimitars, the blades pointing downwards.  All these scaly, spiky, two-edged things stood out piercing and distinct against the grey; and she knew that they were aloes and palm-trees, and that she had come to the end of her journey and was walking in the garden of the Villa des Palmes.  And the thing she dreaded was still waiting a little way beyond the garden, beyond the insubstantial walls; it was looking for her, crying after her, it stretched out its arms to draw her from her sleep.