The reserve of all his school forbade him to say more, but I understood as well as if he had told me that he had been on his knees, praying all the time, and there rose before my mind a picture of the scene—­moonlight, kneeling saint, and watching demon, which the leaf of some illustrated missal might have furnished.

The bronze timepiece over the fireplace struck half-past six.

“I wonder if the carriage is at the door,” said Austyn, rather anxiously.  He went into the hall and looked out through the narrow windows.  There was no carriage visible, and I deeply regretted the second interruption that must follow when it did come.

“Let us walk up the hill and on a little way together.  The carriage will overtake us.  My curiosity is not yet satisfied.”

“Then first, Mr. Lyndsay, you must go back and drink some coffee; you are not strong as I am, or accustomed to go out fasting into the morning air.”

Outside in the shadow of the hill, where the fog lay thick and white, the gloom and the cold of the night still lingered, but as we climbed the hill we climbed, too, into the brightness of a sunny morning—­brilliant, amber-tinted above the long blue shadows.

* * * * *

I had to speak first.

“Now tell me what the face was like.”

“I do not think I can.  To begin with, I have a very indistinct remembrance of either the form or the colouring.  Even at the time my impression of both was very vague; what so overwhelmed and transfixed my attention, to the exclusion of everything besides itself, was the look upon the face.”

“And that?”

“And that I literally cannot describe.  I know no words that could depict it, no images that could suggest it; you might as well ask me to tell you what a new colour was like if I had seen it in my dreams, as some people declare they have done.  I could convey some faint idea of it by describing its effect upon myself, but that, too, is very difficult—­that was like nothing I have ever felt before.  It was the realisation of much which I have affirmed all my life, and steadfastly believed as well, but only with what might be called a notional assent, as the blind man might believe that light is sweet, or one who had never experienced pain might believe it was something from which the senses shrink.  Every day that I have recited the creed, and declared my belief in the Life Everlasting, I have by implication confessed my entire disbelief in any other.  I knew that what seemed so solid is not solid, so real is not real; that the life of the flesh, of the senses, of things seen, is but the “stuff that dreams are made of”—­“a dream within a dream,” as one modern writer has called it; “the shadow of a dream,” as another has it.  But last night—­”

He stood still, gazing straight before him, as if he saw something that I could not see.

“But last night,” I repeated, as we walked on again.