go away.  And after I went I—­I was always missing the game, always wanting to play again.  At what you called ‘candle-lightin’ time,’ wherever I was—­in strange drawing-rooms, on rushing express trains, on ships plowing the seas, sitting about camp-fires in the wilderness—­I’d always seem to see that little, dim-lit room in your New York, and you kneeling beside me on the hearth-rug, with the firelight on your face and hair.  I’ve always been a lonely chap; but after that I was lonelier than ever; I used to think I couldn’t bear it.  Then last night—­how shall I tell you how I felt?  I’ve comforted myself, before, with the dream that some day I might get back to New York, to that little room at candle-lightin’ time, and find you again, and forget everything in all the world but that you were there and I was with you, kneeling on the hearth-rug and making toast for tea.  And when I saw you, all white and silver glitter, talking to the King—­the dream was gone.  There wasn’t any girl on the hearth-rug in New York; there was only another girl of the kind that always makes me feel so strange, so ill at ease.  It was only night before last that I learned I am to go away again directly, to the Far East, for the Government; and I was so happy, for I thought I’d go the westward way and see you again in New York.  Then, suddenly, I realized that you were gone—­not merely from New York, but from the dream.  And I was surprised into rudeness.  That’s all.  But please forgive me!”

“I told you I understood,” said Mary Alice, “and in a way I did—­not that the—­the dream as you call it meant so much to you, but that you were disappointed to find Cinderella come out of her chimney corner and talking to the King.  I know that when we have a person definitely placed in our minds, we don’t like to have him bob up suddenly in quite another quarter and in what seems like quite another character.”

“Not if that person has been a kind of—­of lode-star to you, and you have been steering your course by—­by her,” he said.

Mary Alice flushed.  “Now I think you ought to let me tell,” she began, with downcast eyes.  And so she told:  how she had come there, and how she had stayed, like the little mouse under the Queen’s chair, and how glad she was to have seen from a distance a little of this splendour and great society, and how gladder still to hang her borrowed white and silver away and be done with it and all it stood for and go back to her gown of crash and her chimney-corner place in life, “which I can now see,” she added “is the place for dreams and sweet companionship.”

“And when I get back, will you be there?” he cried, eagerly.

“When you get back I will be there,” she promised.

After that they sat and talked for long and long, while the blue sea sparkled in the summer morning sun.  When, at length, they rose to go, there was a light that never shone on land or sea in his face and in hers.  There had been no further promises; only that one:  “When you get back I will be there.”  But each heart understood the other, and she rejoiced to wait further declaration of his love until he could, according to his tender fancy, make it to her as in his “dream come true.”