answer did not come into the dream. Perhaps she had not answered.
But he could see the ugly man holding out his hands, and the girl
putting her hands into them. He could see her looking up at him again,
and in the beautiful eyes there was that message she wanted him to
read. There, at that place, was the end of the dream-picture; it never
went further, though he tried over and over to carry it on; the girl
looking up, a tall slender shape in white, with the afternoon sun
burnishing her hair, and giving to it the color of a copper beech tree
under which she stood. He knew that he had thought, "I shall never
forget her as she is now, not even when I'm dead." He had kept his
word. He was dead; hovering on the borderland of the unknown: and he
had not forgotten. But just where the dream ended, before he could read
the girl's look and hear what she had to say, her mother had come
quickly out of the house, with an open book in her hand. That seemed to
be the reason why the picture broke.

It seemed afterwards too, though there was no clear vision, that the
girl was willing to marry him, just barely willing. Her mother took it
for granted that she had said "yes" when he asked her, and the girl let
it go as if it were true; though he could not be sure it was what she
had meant when she looked up with the strange light in her eyes, and
tried to speak. He would have given years of the future he hoped for
then, to have been sure, without any doubts.

When he stammered out his questions he had not thought of anything
better than an engagement, to end in marriage if he came home safely
after the war.... The war!... Dim remembrance of hideous suffering
suddenly stirred the slow current of his dream. There had been war.
That was how it had happened! He had been killed in battle. Or else,
none of the dream was true! There had been no such man, no such girl,
no such black and white house reflected in a crystal lake. This was a
dream of things that had never been. A veil of unreality began to fall
between him and the picture he had seen. No, it couldn't have been true
of his life, of course, because the dream had begun again, and was
carrying him on to a wedding. The church in the village ... (he knew
that church well, and the way to it from the big gates and the little
gates; the long way and the short cut) ... The girl, and a man in khaki
were standing together ... the same ugly man, uglier than ever in his
soldier clothes, he though