The woman shot from her bed and ran barefooted, her heart beating madly, into the darkness of the hall to the landing on the stairway.  Something halted her.  There was a broad, uncurtained pane of glass in the front door of the house.  From the landing one might look down the stone steps outside and see clearly in the bright moonlight as far as the beginning of the rose archway.  As she stood gasping, from beneath the flowers Brock stepped into the moonlight and began, unhurried, buoyant, as she had but now seen him in her dream, to mount the steps.  Mavourneen pressed at his side, and his hand was on the dog’s head.  As he came, he lifted his face to his mother with the accustomed, every-day smile which she knew, as if he were coming home, as he had come home on many a moonlit evening from a dance in town to talk the day over with her.  As she stared, standing in the dark on the landing, her pulse racing, yet still with the stillness of infinity, an arm came around her, a hand gripped her shoulder, and young Hugh’s voice spoke.

“Mother!  It’s Brock!” he whispered.

At the words she fled headlong down to the door and caught at the handle.  It was fastened, and for a moment she could not think of the bolt.  Brock stood close outside; she saw the light on his brown head and the bend in the long, strong fingers that caressed Mavourneen’s fur.  He smiled at her happily—­Brock—­three feet away.  Just as the bolt loosened, with an inexplicable, swift impulse she was cold with terror.  For the half of a second, perhaps, she halted, possessed by some formless fear stronger than herself—­humanity dreading something not human, something unknown, overwhelming.  She halted not a whole second—­for it was Brock.  Brock!  Wide open she flung the door and sprang out.

There was no one there.  Only Mavourneen stood in the cold moonlight, and cried, and looked up, puzzled, at empty air.

“Oh, Brock, Brock!  Oh, dear Brock!” the woman called and flung out her arms.  “Brock—­Brock—­don’t leave me.  Don’t go!”

Mavourneen sniffed about the dark hall, investigating to find the master who had come home and gone away so swiftly.  With that young Hugh was lifting her in his arms, carrying her up the broad stairs into his room.  “You’re barefooted,” he spoke brokenly.

She caught his hand as he wrapped her in a rug on the sofa.  “Hugh—­you saw—­it was Brock?”

“Yes, dearest, it was our Brock,” answered Hugh stumblingly.

“You saw—­and I—­and Mavourneen.”

“Mavonrneen is Irish,” young Hugh said.  “She has the second sight,” and the big old dog laid her nose on the woman’s knee and lifted topaz eyes, asking questions, and whimpered broken-heartedly.

“Dear dog,” murmured the woman and drew the lovely head to her.  “You saw him.”  And then; “Hughie—­he came to tell us.  He is—­dead.”

“I think so,” whispered young Hugh with bent head.

Then, fighting for breath, she told what had happened—­the dream, the intense happiness of it, how Brock had come smiling.  “And Hugh, the only thing he said, two or three times over, was, ’I’m coming to take Hughie’s hand.’”