“Something of that intense reality of conviction vanished.  I began to feel sure it was a dream.  And then it came again.

“When the dream came again, nearly four days later, it was very different.  I think it certain that four days had also elapsed in the dream.  Many things had happened in the north, and the shadow of them was back again between us, and this time it was not so easily dispelled.  I began I know with moody musings.  Why, in spite of all, should I go back, go back for all the rest of my days to toil and stress, insults and perpetual dissatisfaction, simply to save hundreds of millions of common people, whom I did not love, whom too often I could do no other than despise, from the stress and anguish of war and infinite misrule?  And after all I might fail.  They all sought their own narrow ends, and why should not I—­why should not I also live as a man?  And out of such thoughts her voice summoned me, and I lifted my eyes.

“I found myself awake and walking.  We had come out above the Pleasure City, we were near the summit of Monte Solaro and looking towards the bay.  It was the late afternoon and very clear.  Far away to the left Ischia hung in a golden haze between sea and sky, and Naples was coldly white against the hills, and before us was Vesuvius with a tall and slender streamer feathering at last towards the south, and the ruins of Torre dell’ Annunziata and Castellammare glittering and near.”

I interrupted suddenly:  “You have been to Capri, of course?”

“Only in this dream,” he said, “only in this dream.  All across the bay beyond Sorrento were the floating palaces of the Pleasure City moored and chained.  And northward were the broad floating stages that received the aeroplanes.  Aeroplanes fell out of the sky every afternoon, each bringing its thousands of pleasure-seekers from the uttermost parts of the earth to Capri and its delights.  All these things, I say, stretched below.

“But we noticed them only incidentally because of an unusual sight that evening had to show.  Five war aeroplanes that had long slumbered useless in the distant arsenals of the Rhinemouth were manoeuvring now in the eastward sky.  Evesham had astonished the world by producing them and others, and sending them to circle here and there.  It was the threat material in the great game of bluff he was playing, and it had taken even me by surprise.  He was one of those incredibly stupid energetic people who seem sent by heaven to create disasters.  His energy to the first glance seemed so wonderfully like capacity!  But he had no imagination, no invention, only a stupid, vast, driving force of will, and a mad faith in his stupid idiot ‘luck’ to pull him through.  I remember how we stood upon the headland watching the squadron circling far away, and how I weighed the full meaning of the sight, seeing clearly the way things must go.  And then even it was not too late.  I might have gone back, I think, and saved the world.  The people of the north would follow me, I knew, granted only that in one thing I respected their moral standards.  The east and south would trust me as they would trust no other northern man.  And I knew I had only to put it to her and she would have let me go . . . .  Not because she did not love me!