it. Step by step, helping herself along by the wall, she came nearer
and nearer, with the paper in her hand. She looked at the paper--she
looked in Alicia's face--she lifted the long, loose sleeve of her gown,
and examined her hand and arm. I saw fear suddenly take the place of anger
in Alicia's eyes. She shook herself free of my mother's grasp. "Mad!" she
said to herself, "and Francis never told me!" With those words she ran out
of the room.

I was hastening out after her, when my mother signed to me to stop. She
read the words written on the paper. While they fell slowly, one by one,
from her lips, she pointed toward the open door.

"Light gray eyes, with a droop in the left eyelid. Flaxen hair, with a
gold-yellow streak in it. White arms, with a down upon them. Little,
lady's hand, with a rosy-red look about the finger nails. The Dream Woman,
Francis! The Dream Woman!"

Something darkened the parlor window as those words were spoken. I looked
sidelong at the shadow. Alicia Warlock had come back! She was peering in
at us over the low window blind. There was the fatal face which had first
looked at me in the bedroom of the lonely inn. There, resting on the
window blind, was the lovely little hand which had held the murderous
knife. I _had_ seen her before we met in the village. The Dream Woman! The
Dream Woman!

XI

I expect nobody to approve of what I have next to tell of myself. In three
weeks from the day when my mother had identified her with the Woman of the
Dream, I took Alicia Warlock to church, and made her my wife. I was a man
bewitched. Again and again I say it--I was a man bewitched!

During the interval before my marriage, our little household at the
cottage was broken up. My mother and my aunt quarreled. My mother,
believing in the Dream, entreated me to break off my engagement. My aunt,
believing in the cards, urged me to marry.

This difference of opinion produced a dispute between them, in the course
of which my aunt Chance--quite unconscious of having any superstitious
feelings of her own--actually set out the cards which prophesied
happiness to me in my married life, and asked my mother how anybody but "a
blinded heathen could be fule enough, after seeing those cairds, to
believe in a dream!" This was, naturally, too much for my mother's
patience; hard words followed on either side; Mrs. Chance returned in
dudgeon to her friends in Scotland. She left me a written statement of my
future prosp