During her illness she had had dreams, and had come to herself at intervals to find Ed or the doctor, Mrs. Hepburn or her aunt, bending over her.  These kind, solicitous faces had been no more than a glimpse, and then she had gone off into the dreams again.  The curious thing had been that the dreams had seemed to be her vivid waking life, and the other things—­the anxious faces, the details of her dingy bedroom, the thermometer under her tongue—­had been the dream.  And, though she had come back to actuality, the dreams had never quite vanished.  She could remember no more of them than that they had seemed to hold a high singing and jocundity, issuing from some region of haze and golden light; and they seemed to hover, ever on the point of being recaptured, yet ever eluding all her mental efforts.  She was living now between reality and a vision.

She had fewer words than sensations, and it was a little pitiful to hear her vainly striving to make clear what she meant.

“It’s so queer,” she said.  “It’s like being on the edge of something—­a sort of tiptoe—­I can’t describe it.  Sometimes I could almost touch it with my hand, and then it goes away, but never quite away.  It’s like something just past the corner of my eye, over my shoulder, and I sit very still sometimes, trying to take it off its guard.  But the moment I move my head it moves too—­like this—­”

Again he gave a quick start at the suddenness of her action.  Very stealthily her faunish eyes had stolen sideways, and then she had swiftly turned her head.

“Here, I say, don’t, Bessie!” he cried nervously.  “You look awfully uncanny when you do that!  You’re brooding,” he continued, “that’s what you’re doing, brooding.  You’re getting into a low state.  You want bucking up.  I don’t think I shall go to the Polytec. to-night; I shall stay and cheer you up.  You know, I really don’t think you’re making an effort, darling.”

His last words seemed to strike her.  They seemed to fit in with something of which she too was conscious.  “Not making an effort ...” she wondered how he knew that.  She felt in some vague way that it was important that she should make an effort.

For, while her dream ever evaded her, and yet never ceased to call her with such a voice as he who reads on a magic page of the calling of elves hears stilly in his brain, yet somehow behind the seduction was another and a sterner voice.  There was warning as well as fascination.  Beyond that edge at which she strained on tiptoe, mingled with the jocund calls to Hasten, Hasten, were deeper calls that bade her Beware.  They puzzled her.  Beware of what?  Of what danger?  And to whom?...

“How do you mean, I’m not making an effort, Ed?” she asked slowly, again looking into the fire, where the kettle now made a gnat-like singing.

“Why, an effort to get all right again.  To be as you used to be—­as, of course, you will be soon.”

“As I used to be?” The words came with a little check in her breathing.