nter, the room had filled
with mist. He had made one desperate struggle, had seen through his
hall-closed eyes that Craven was looking at a magazine and blowing,
lazily, clouds of smoke from his pipe . . . then he had known no more.

Now, as he struggled to himself, he saw that Craven was standing over
him, shaking him by the arm.

"Hullo," he said stupidly, "I'm afraid I must have dropped off. I'm
afraid you must have thought me most frightfully rude."

Craven left him and went back to his chair.

"No," he said, "that's all right--only you _did_ talk in the most
extraordinary way."

"Did I?" Olva looked at him gravely. "What did I say?"

"Oh--I don't know--only you shouted a lot. You're overdone, aren't you?
Been working too hard I expect." Then he added, slowly, "You were crying
out about Carfax."

There was a long pause. The clock ticked, the light slowly faded,
leaving the room in shadow. Craven's voice was uncomfortable. He said at
last--

"You must have been thinking a lot about Carfax lately."

"What did I say?" asked Olva again.

"Oh, nothing." Craven turned his eyes away to the shadowy panes. "You
were dreaming about a road--and something about a wood . . . and a
matchbox."

"I've been sleeping badly." Olva got up, filled his pipe and relit it.
"I expect, although we don't say much about it, the Carfax business has
got on all our nerves. You don't look yourself, Craven."

He didn't. His careless, happy look had left him. Increasingly, every
day, Olva seemed to see in him a likeness to his mother and sister. The
eyes now were darker, the tines of the mouth were harder.

Meanwhile so strong bad the dream's impression been that Olva could not
yet disentangle it from his waking thoughts. He was in his room and yet
the white road stretched out of it--somewhere there by the
bookcase--oil through the mist into the heart of the dark wood.

He had welcomed during these last days Craven's advances towards
friendship, partly because he wanted friends now, and partly, he was
beginning now to recognize, there was, in the back of his mind, the
lingering memory of the kind eyes of Margaret Craven. He perceived, too,
that here was sign enough of change in him--that he who had, from
his earliest days, held himself proudly, sternly aloof from all human
companionship save that of his father, should now, so readily and
eagerly, greet it. Craven had been proud of him, eager to be with him,
and had shown, in his ar