The light went out of my life, and I was once more alone--more
wretchedly and miserably alone than if I had never met her.
I went back to Pentonville, and outwardly took up the thread of my
monotonous existence, and ate, drank, and worked, and went about as
usual, but as one in an ordinary dream. For now dreams--true dreams--had
become the only reality for me.
[Illustration: A FAREWELL.]
So great, so inconceivable and unexampled a wonder had been wrought in a
dream that all the conditions of life had been altered and reversed.
I and another human being had met--actually and really met--in a double
dream, a dream common to us both, and clasped each other's hands! And
each had spoken words to the other which neither ever would or ever
could forget.
And this other human being and I had been enshrined in each other's
memory for years--since childhood--and were now linked together by a tie
so marvellous, an experience so unprecedented, that neither could ever
well be out of the other's thoughts as long as life and sense and
memory lasted.
Her very self, as we talked to each other under the ash-tree at Cray,
was less vividly present to me than that other and still dearer self of
hers with whom I had walked up the avenue in that balmy dream
atmosphere, where we had lived and moved and had our being together for
a few short moments, yet each believing the other at the time to be a
mere figment of his own (and her) sleeping imagination; such stuff as
dreams are made of!
And lo! it was all true--as true as the common experience of every-day
life--more (ten times more), because through our keener and more exalted
sense perceptions, and less divided attention, we were more conscious of
each other's real inner being--linked closer together for a space--than
two mortals had probably ever been since the world began.
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