it was her thought that she was yet on the bank by
the pool, but as her mind renewed its hold she knew this
was not so. She breathed an air alien to her living
nostrils, and knew that here she had no part in a world of
human creatures, and the thought rose in her that she was
dead, drowned in the pool, and had reached the next world.
'Can this be hell?' she wondered, as she rose to a sitting
posture and strove to see about her.

"It was a grassed mound she sat on, in a kind of plain, and
she heard the creaking of bushes about her where no wind
breathed on her cheek. The dimness was not the part
darkness of a summer night, but a shadow where no sun had
ever shone, a barren gloom that was lugubrious and uneasy.
A dozen feet from her all was blurred and not to be
distinguished, but it seemed to her that many people moved
round about her, and now and again there was a rustle of
hushed voices, as of folk who met stealthily and spoke with
checked breath. In the dimness shapes moved, faintly
suggested to her eyes, and presently, though she had no
thrill of fear, a loneliness oppressed her that nearly made
her weep. She was not as one that has no comrade in the
world, for such a one is at least kin by blood and flesh to
all others. She was alone, as a living man in a tomb is
alone.

"With a little fervor of troubled recollection, like a
child reciting a psalm, she told us how she rose to her
feet and gazed about her, pondering which way to take. And
while she was yet doubtful a hand touched her elbow, and
she started to face a man that had come from behind her.
Staring at his face with wits clenched like a fist, the
contours of the face in the water returned to her mind, the
sharp brown face that had grown up in the middle of the
countenance she dreamed upon, and she knew in a moment that
here was the face again and the rest of the man with it.

"'I knew it at once when his teeth shone through his
smile,' she said. 'He was not so tall as I, and very brown
in that sorrowful light, but not black. There was a robe he
wore from his neck to his ankles that left one arm bare and
the little feet below its hem, and his head was bare with
straight black hair upon it. His hand was on my arm, and he
stood before me and looked in my face and smiled a little
at me, very gently and timidly.'

"It seems he found her scarcely less strange than she found
him. In his bearing was something of awe and wonder, while
she stared with a me