Then I see clearer.  I see the room in which they live.  It is very poor.  An old-fashioned piano stands in one corner, and beside it is a table on which lie scattered a tumbled mass of papers round an ink-stand.  An empty chair waits before the table.  The woman sits by the open window.

From far below there rises the sound of a great city.  Its lights throw up faint beams into the dark room.  The smell of its streets is in the woman’s nostrils.

Every now and again she looks towards the door and listens:  then turns to the open window.  And I notice that each time she looks towards the door the evil in her face shrinks back; but each time she turns to the window it grows more fierce and sullen.

Suddenly she starts up, and there is a terror in her eyes that frightens me as I dream, and I see great beads of sweat upon her brow.  Then, very slowly, her face changes, and I see again the evil creature of the night.  She wraps around her an old cloak, and creeps out.  I hear her footsteps going down the stairs.  They grow fainter and fainter.  I hear a door open.  The roar of the streets rushes up into the house, and the woman’s footsteps are swallowed up.

Time drifts onward through my dream.  Scenes change, take shape, and fade; but all is vague and undefined, until, out of the dimness, there fashions itself a long, deserted street.  The lights make glistening circles on the wet pavement.  A figure, dressed in gaudy rags, slinks by, keeping close against the wall.  Its back is towards me, and I do not see its face.  Another figure glides from out the shadows.  I look upon its face, and I see it is the face that the woman’s eyes gazed up into and worshipped long ago, when my dream was just begun.  But the fairness and the purity are gone from it, and it is old and evil, as the woman’s when I looked upon her last.  The figure in the gaudy rags moves slowly on.  The second figure follows it, and overtakes it.  The two pause, and speak to one another as they draw near.  The street is very dark where they have met, and the figure in the gaudy rags keeps its face still turned aside.  They walk together in silence, till they come to where a flaring gas-lamp hangs before a tavern; and there the woman turns, and I see that it is the woman of my dream.  And she and the man look into each other’s eyes once more.

* * * * *

In another dream that I remember, an angel (or a devil, I am not quite sure which) has come to a man and told him that so long as he loves no living human thing—­so long as he never suffers himself to feel one touch of tenderness towards wife or child, towards kith or kin, towards stranger or towards friend, so long will he succeed and prosper in his dealings—­so long will all this world’s affairs go well with him; and he will grow each day richer and greater and more powerful.  But if ever he let one kindly thought for living thing come into his heart, in that moment all his plans and schemes will topple down about his ears; and from that hour his name will be despised by men, and then forgotten.