momentary
return to consciousness in his body on the bed, and the repaired
mechanism of the brain and muscles had summoned him back on a sort of
trial visit. He remembered nothing of it afterwards, any more than one
remembers the experiences of deep sleep; but the fact was that, with the
descent of the darkness upon him in the branches, he had opened his eyes
once again on the scene in the night-nursery bedroom where his body lay.

He saw figures standing round the bed and about the room; his mother
with the same white face as before, was still bending over the bed
asking him if he knew her; a tall man in a long black coat moved
noiselessly to and fro; and he saw a shaded lamp on a table a little to
the right of the bed. Nothing seemed to have changed very much, though
there had probably been time enough since he last opened his eyes for
the black-coated doctor to have gone and come again for a second visit.
He held an instrument in his hands that shone brightly in the lamplight.
Jimbo saw this plainly and wondered what it was. He felt as if he were
just waking out of a nice, deep sleep--dreamless and undisturbed. The
Empty House, the Governess, Fright and the Children had all vanished
from his memory, and he knew no more about wings and feathers than he
did about the science of meteorology.

But the bedroom scene was a mere glimpse after all; his eyes were
already beginning to close again. First they shut out the figure of the
doctor; then the bed-curtains; and then the nurse moved her arm, making
the whole scene quiver for an instant, like some huge jelly-shape,
before it dipped into profound darkness and disappeared altogether. His
mother's voice ran off into a thin trickle of sound, miles and miles
away, and the light from the lamp followed him with its glare for less
than half a second. All had vanished.

"Jimbo, dear, where have you been? Can you remember anything?" asked the
soft voice beside him, as he looked first at the stars overhead, and
then from the tracery of branches and leaves beneath him to the great
sea of tree-tops and open country all round.

But he could tell her nothing; he seemed dreamy and absent-minded, lying
and staring at her as if he hardly knew who she was or what she was
saying. His mind was still hovering near the border-line of the two
states of consciousness, like the region between sleeping and waking,
where both worlds seem unreal and wholly wonderful.

He could not answer her q