“‘But war—­,’ she said.

“I sat down beside her.  I put an arm behind her and took her hand in mine.  I set myself to drive that doubt away—­I set myself to fill her mind with pleasant things again.  I lied to her, and in lying to her I lied also to myself.  And she was only too ready to believe me, only too ready to forget.

“Very soon the shadow had gone again, and we were hastening to our bathing-place in the Grotta del Bovo Marino, where it was our custom to bathe every day.  We swam and splashed one another, and in that buoyant water I seemed to become something lighter and stronger than a man.  And at last we came out dripping and rejoicing and raced among the rocks.  And then I put on a dry bathing-dress, and we sat to bask in the sun, and presently I nodded, resting my head against her knee, and she put her hand upon my hair and stroked it softly and I dozed.  And behold! as it were with the snapping of the string of a violin, I was awakening, and I was in my own bed in Liverpool, in the life of to-day.

“Only for a time I could not believe that all these vivid moments had been no more than the substance of a dream.

“In truth, I could not believe it a dream for all the sobering reality of things about me.  I bathed and dressed as it were by habit, and as I shaved I argued why I of all men should leave the woman I loved to go back to fantastic politics in the hard and strenuous north.  Even if Evesham did force the world back to war, what was that to me?  I was a man with the heart of a man, and why should I feel the responsibility of a deity for the way the world might go?

“You know that is not quite the way I think about affairs, about my real affairs.  I am a solicitor, you know, with a point of view.

“The vision was so real, you must understand, so utterly unlike a dream that I kept perpetually recalling little irrelevant details; even the ornament of the book-cover that lay on my wife’s sewing-machine in the breakfast-room recalled with the utmost vividness the gilt line that ran about the seat in the alcove where I had talked with the messenger from my deserted party.  Have you ever heard of a dream that had a quality like that?”

“Like—?”

“So that afterwards you remembered little details you had forgotten.”

I thought.  I had never noticed the point before, but he was right.

“Never,” I said.  “That is what you never seem to do with dreams.”

“No,” he answered.  “But that is just what I did.  I am a solicitor, you must understand, in Liverpool, and I could not help wondering what the clients and business people I found myself talking to in my office would think if I told them suddenly I was in love with a girl who would be born a couple of hundred years or so hence, and worried about the politics of my great-great-great-grandchildren.  I was chiefly busy that day negotiating a ninety-nine-year building lease.  It was a private builder in a hurry, and we wanted to tie him in every possible way.  I had an interview with him, and he showed a certain want of temper that sent me to bed still irritated.  That night I had no dream.  Nor did I dream the next night, at least, to remember.