The curious thing had
been that the dreams had seemed to be her vivid waking life, and the
other things--the anxious faces, the details of her dingy bedroom, the
thermometer under her tongue--had been the dream. And, though she had
come back to actuality, the dreams had never quite vanished. She could
remember no more of them than that they had seemed to hold a high singing
and jocundity, issuing from some region of haze and golden light; and
they seemed to hover, ever on the point of being recaptured, yet ever
eluding all her mental efforts. She was living now between reality and a
vision. She had fewer words than sensations, and it was a little pitiful to hear
her vainly striving to make clear what she meant. "It's so queer," she said. "It's like being on the edge of something--a
sort of tiptoe--I can't describe it. Sometimes I could almost touch it
with my hand, and then it goes away, but never quite away. It's like
something just past the corner of my eye, over my shoulder, and I sit
very still sometimes, trying to take it off its guard. But the moment I
move my head it moves too--like this--"

Again he gave a quick start at the suddenness of her action. Very
stealthily her faunish eyes had stolen sideways, and then she had swiftly
turned her head. "Here, I say, don't, Bessie!" he cried nervously. "You look awfully
uncanny when you do that! You're brooding," he continued, "that's what
you're doing, brooding. You're getting into a low state. You want bucking
up. I don't think I shall go to the Polytec. to-night; I shall stay and
cheer you up. You know, I really don't think you're making an effort,
darling." His last words seemed to strike her. They seemed to fit in with something
of which she too was conscious. "Not making an effort ..." she wondered
how he knew that. She felt in some vague way that it was important that
she should make an effort. For, while her dream ever evaded her, and yet never ceased to call her
with such a voice as he who reads on a magic page of the calling of elves
hears stilly in his brain, yet somehow behind the seduction was another
and a sterner voice. There was warning as well as fascination. Beyond
that edge at which she strained on tiptoe, mingled with the jocund calls
to Hasten, Hasten, were deeper calls that bade her Beware. They puzzled
her. Beware of what? Of what danger? And to whom?... "How do you mean, I'm not making an effort, Ed?" she asked slowly, again
looking into the fire, where the kettle now made a gnat-like singing. "Why, an effort to get all right again. To be as you used to be--as, of
course, you will be soon." "As I used to be?" The words came with a little check in her breathing. "Yes, before all this. To be yourself, you know." "Myself?" "All jolly, and without these jerks and jumps. I wish you could get away. A fortnight by the sea would do you all the good in the world." She knew not what it was in the words "the sea" that caused her suddenly
to breathe more deeply. The sea!... It was as if, by the mere uttering of
them, he had touched some secret spring, brought to fulfilment some
spell. What had he meant by speaking of the sea?... A fortnight before,
had somebody spoken to her of the sea it would have been the sea of
Margate, of Brighton, of Southend, that, supplying the image that a word
calls up as if by conjuration, she would have seen before her; and what
other image could she supply, could she possibly supply, now?... Yet she
did, or almost did, supply one. What new experience had she had, or what
old, old one had been released in her? With that confused, joyous dinning
just beyond the range of physical hearing there had suddenly mingled
a new illusion of sound--a vague, vast pash and rustle, silky and harsh
both at once, its tireless voice holding meanings of stillness and
solitude compared with which the silence that is mere absence of sound
was vacancy. It was part of her dream, invisible, intangible, inaudible,
yet there. As if he had been an enchanter, it had come into being at the
word upon his lips. Had he other such words? Had he the Master Word
that--(ah, she knew what the Master Word would do!) --would make the
Vision the Reality and the Reality the Vision? Deep within her she felt
something--her soul, herself, she knew not what--thrill and turn over and
settle again....

"The sea," she repeated in a low voice. "Yes, that's what you want to set you up--rather! Do you remember that
fortnight at Littlehampton, you and me and your Aunt? Jolly that was! I
like Littlehampton. It isn't flash like Brighton, and Margate's always so
beastly crowded. And do you remember that afternoon by the windmill? I
did love you that afternoon, Bessie!"... He continued to talk, but she was not listening. She was wondering why
the words "the sea" were somehow part of it all--the pins and brooches
of the Museum, the book on her knees, the dream. She remembered a game of
hide-and-seek she had played as a child, in which cries of "Warm, warm,
warmer!" had announced the approach to the hidden object. Oh, she was
getting warm--positively hot.... He had ceased to talk, and was watching her. Perhaps it was the thought
of how he had loved her that afternoon by the windmill that had brought
him close to her chair again. She was aware of his nearness, and closed
her eyes for a moment as if she dreaded something. Then she said quickly,
"Is tea nearly ready, Ed?" and, as he turned to the table, took up the
book again. She felt that even to touch that book brought her "warmer." It fell open
at a page. She did not hear the clatter Ed made at the table, nor yet the
babble his words had evoked, of the pierrots and banjos and minstrels of
Margate and Littlehampton. It was to hear a gladder, wilder tumult that
she sat once more so still, so achingly listening....

_"The earnest trumpet spake, and silver thrills
From kissing cymbals made a merry din--"_

The words seemed to move on the page. In her eyes another light than the
firelight seemed to play. Her breast rose, and in her thick white throat
a little inarticulate sound twanged. "Eh? Did you speak, Bessie?" Ed asked, stopping in his buttering of
bread. "Eh?... No." In answering, her head had turned for a moment, and she had seen him. Suddenly it struck her with force: what a shaving of a man he was! Desk-chested, weak-necked, conscious of his little "important" lip
and chin--yes, he needed a Polytechnic gymnastic course! Then she
remarked how once, at Margate, she had seen him in the distance, as
in a hired baggy bathing-dress he had bathed from a machine, in muddy
water, one of a hundred others, all rather cold, flinging a polo-ball
about and shouting stridently. "A sound mind in a sound body!"... He
was rather vain of his neat shoes, too, and doubtless stunted his
feet; and she had seen the little spot on his neck caused by the
chafing of his collar-stud.... No, she did not want him to touch her,
just now at any rate.