I was still holding the duchess's hand, and felt the warmth of it
through her glove; it stole up my arm like a magnetic current. I was
in Elysium; a heavenly sense had come over me that at last my
periphery had been victoriously invaded by a spirit other than mine--a
most powerful and beneficent spirit. There was a blessed fault in my
impenetrable armor of self, after all, and the genius of strength and
charity and loving-kindness had found it out.

"Now you're dreaming true," she said. "Where are those boys going?"

"To church, to make their _premiere communion_," I replied.

"That's right. You're dreaming true because I've got you by the hand.
Do you know that tune?"

I listened, and the words belonging to it came out of the past, and I
said them to her, and she laughed again, with her eyes screwed up
deliciously.

"Quite right--quite!" she exclaimed. "How odd that you should know
them! How well you pronounce French for an Englishman! For you are Mr.
Ibbetson, Lady Cray's architect?"

I assented, and she let go my hand.

The street was full of people--familiar forms and faces and voices,
chatting together and looking down the road after the yellow omnibus;
old attitudes, old tricks of gait and manner, old forgotten French
ways of speech--all as it was long ago. Nobody noticed us, and we
walked up the now deserted avenue.

The happiness, the enchantment of it all! Could it be that I was dead,
that I had died suddenly in my sleep, at the hotel in the Rue de la
Michodiere? Could it be that the Duchess of Towers was dead too--had
been killed by some accident on her way from St. Cloud to Paris? and
that, both having died, so near each other, we had begun our eternal
after-life in this heavenly fashion?

That was too good to be true, I reflected; some instinct told me that
this was not death, but transcendent earthly life--and also, alas!
that it would not endure forever!

I was deeply conscious of every feature in her face, every movement of
her body, every detail of her dress,--more so than I could have been
in actual life,--and said to myself, "Whatever this is, it is no
dream." But I felt there was about me the unspeakable elation which
can come to us only in our waking moments when we are at our very
best; and then only feebly, in comparison with this, and to many of us
never. It never had to me, since that morning when I had found the
little wheelbarrow.

I was also conscious, however, that the avenue i