what she had herself done, "But it wasn't only
_that_, that you hadn't been at home," she went on. "I waited till the
hour at which we had found Mrs. Muldoon that day of my going with you;
and she arrived, as I've told you, while, failing to bring any one to the
door, I lingered in my despair on the steps. After a little, if she
hadn't come, by such a mercy, I should have found means to hunt her up.
But it wasn't," said Alice Staverton, as if once more with her fine
intentions--"it wasn't only that."

His eyes, as he lay, turned back to her. "What more then?"

She met it, the wonder she had stirred. "In the cold dim dawn, you say?
Well, in the cold dim dawn of this morning I too saw you."

"Saw _me_--?"

"Saw _him_," said Alice Staverton. "It must have been at the same
moment."

He lay an instant taking it in--as if he wished to be quite reasonable.
"At the same moment?"

"Yes--in my dream again, the same one I've named to you. He came back to
me. Then I knew it for a sign. He had come to you."

At this Brydon raised himself; he had to see her better. She helped him
when she understood his movement, and he sat up, steadying himself beside
her there on the window-bench and with his right hand grasping her left.
"_He_ didn't come to me."

"You came to yourself," she beautifully smiled.

"Ah I've come to myself now--thanks to you, dearest. But this brute,
with his awful face--this brute's a black stranger. He's none of _me_,
even as I _might_ have been," Brydon sturdily declared.

But she kept the clearness that was like the breath of infallibility.
"Isn't the whole point that you'd have been different?"

He almost scowled for it. "As different as _that_--?"

Her look again was more beautiful to him than the things of this world.
"Haven't you exactly wanted to know _how_ different? So this morning,"
she said, "you appeared to me."

"Like _him_?"

"A black stranger!"

"Then how did you know it was I?"

"Because, as I told you weeks ago, my mind, my imagination, has worked so
over what you might, what you mightn't have been--to show you, you see,
how I've thought of you. In the midst of that you came to me--that my
wonder might be answered. So I knew," she went on; "and believed that,
since the question held you too so fast, as you told me that day, you too
would see for yourself. And when this morning I again saw I knew it
would be because you had--and also then, from the first moment, b