He stopped.

“I have lived three-and-fifty years in this world.  I have had mother, sisters, friends, wife and daughters—­all their faces, the play of their faces, I know.  But the face of this girl—­it is much more real to me.  I can bring it back into memory so that I see it again—­I could draw it or paint it.  And after all—­”

He stopped—­but I said nothing.

“The face of a dream—­the face of a dream.  She was beautiful.  Not that beauty which is terrible, cold, and worshipful, like the beauty of a saint; nor that beauty that stirs fierce passions; but a sort of radiation, sweet lips that softened into smiles, and grave gray eyes.  And she moved gracefully, she seemed to have part with all pleasant and gracious things—­”

He stopped, and his face was downcast and hidden.  Then he looked up at me and went on, making no further attempt to disguise his absolute belief in the reality of his story.

“You see, I had thrown up my plans and ambitions, thrown up all I had ever worked for or desired for her sake.  I had been a master man away there in the north, with influence and property and a great reputation, but none of it had seemed worth having beside her.  I had come to the place, this city of sunny pleasures with her, and left all those things to wreck and ruin just to save a remnant at least of my life.  While I had been in love with her before I knew that she had any care for me, before I had imagined that she would dare—­that we should dare, all my life had seemed vain and hollow, dust and ashes.  It was dust and ashes.  Night after night and through the long days I had longed and desired—­my soul had beaten against the thing forbidden!

“But it is impossible for one man to tell another just these things.  It’s emotion, it’s a tint, a light that comes and goes.  Only while it’s there, everything changes, everything.  The thing is I came away and left them in their Crisis to do what they could.”

“Left whom?” I asked, puzzled.

“The people up in the north there.  You see—­in this dream, anyhow—­I had been a big man, the sort of man men come to trust in, to group themselves about.  Millions of men who had never seen me were ready to do things and risk things because of their confidence in me.  I had been playing that game for years, that big laborious game, that vague, monstrous political game amidst intrigues and betrayals, speech and agitation.  It was a vast weltering world, and at last I had a sort of leadership against the Gang—­you know it was called the Gang—­a sort of compromise of scoundrelly projects and base ambitions and vast public emotional stupidities and catch-words—­the Gang that kept the world noisy and blind year by year, and all the while that it was drifting, drifting towards infinite disaster.  But I can’t expect you to understand the shades and complications of the year—­the year something or other ahead.  I had it all—­down to the smallest details—­in