geness of this French house, I see everything about me with
astonishment, and feel I may wake at any moment to the familiar things
of that home in which I fell asleep to dream of calamity.

Moving about this dubious and unauthentic scene of war, an atom of a
fortuitous host, each one of the host glancing at me with inscrutable
eyes which seem to show in passing--if they show anything at all--a
faint hint of reproach, the interruption of war by the page of a
familiar book, and the sudden anxious effort by one of the uniformed
phantoms to recover words which you remember well enough were once
worth hearing, was like momentary recovery. An unexpected revelation.
For a moment I saw the same old enduring earth under us. All was well.

I often doubt here the existence of a man who is talking to me. He
seems altogether incredible. He might be talking across the Styx; and I
am not sure at the moment on which side of that river I stand. Is he on
the right side or am I? Which of us has got the place where a daily sun
still rises? Yes, it is the living men here who are the uncanny
spectres.

I have come in a lonely spot upon a little cross by the wayside, and
have been stopped by a familiar name on it. Dead? No. There, right
enough, is my veritable friend, as I knew and admired him. He cannot be
dead. But those men in muddy clothes who sometimes consort with me
round the burning logs on the hearth of an old chateau at night, I look
across the floor at them as across countless ages, and listen to their
voices till they sound unintelligibly from a remote and alien past. I
do not know what they say to me. I am encompassed by dark and insoluble
magic, and have forgotten the Open Sesame, though I try hard to
remember it; for these present circumstances and the beings who move in
them are of a world unreal and unreasonable.

I get up from the talk of war by that fireside of an old chateau built
on a still more ancient field where English archers fought a famous
battle six hundred years ago. A candle stands on a bracket beneath a
portrait of a lady. The lady is in the dress of the days of the French
Revolution. She is young and vivid, and looks down at me under lowered
eyelids in amused and enticing scrutiny. Her little mouth has the
faintest trace of a contemplative smile; and as I look at her I could
swear the corners of her mouth twitch, as if in the restraint of
complete understanding.

She is long gone. She was executed at Arra