“By very long experience, as I know him.”

“Neither your gifts nor his knowledge of them can change dreams to facts.”

Unorna smiled again.

“You can produce a dream—­nothing more,” continued the Wanderer, drawn at last into argument.  “I, too, know something of these things.  The wisdom of the Egyptians is not wholly lost yet.  You may possess some of it, as well as the undeveloped power which could put all their magic within your reach if you knew how to use it.  Yet a dream is a dream.”

“Philosophers have disputed that,” answered Unorna.  “I am no philosopher, but I can overthrow the results of all their disputations.”

“You can do this.  If I resign my will into your keeping you can cause me to dream.  You can call up vividly before me the remembered and unremembered sights of my life.  You can make me see clearly the sights impressed upon your own memory.  You might do that, and yet you could be showing me nothing which I do not see now before me—­of those things which I care to see.”

“But suppose that you were wrong, and that I had no dream to show you, but a reality?”

She spoke the words very earnestly, gazing into his eyes at last without fear.  Something in her tone struck him and fixed his attention.

“There is no sleep needed to see realities,” he said.

“I did not say that there was.  I only asked you to come with me to the place where she is.”

The Wanderer started slightly and forgot all the instinct of opposition to her which he had felt so strongly before.

“Do you mean that you know—­that you can take me to her——­” he could not find words.  A strange, overmastering astonishment took possession of him, and with it came wild hope and the wilder longing to reach its realisation instantly.

“What else could I have meant?  What else did I say?” Her eyes were beginning to glitter in the gathering dusk.

The Wanderer no longer avoided their look, but he passed his hand over his brow, as though dazed.

“I only asked you to come with me,” she repeated softly.  “There is nothing supernatural about that.  When I saw that you did not believe me I did not try to lead you then, though she is waiting for you.  She bade me bring you to her.”

“You have seen her?  You have talked with her?  She sent you?  Oh, for God’s sake, come quickly!—­come, come!”

He put out his hand as though to take hers and lead her away.  She grasped it eagerly.  He had not seen that she had drawn off her glove.  He was lost.  Her eyes held him and her fingers touched his bare wrist.  His lids drooped and his will was hers.  In the intolerable anxiety of the moment he had forgotten to resist, he had not even thought of resisting.

There were great blocks of stone in the desolate place, landed there before the river had frozen for a great building, whose gloomy, unfinished mass stood waiting for the warmth of spring to be completed.  She led him by the hand, passive and obedient as a child, to a sheltered spot and made him sit down upon one of the stones.  It was growing dark.