e of the dream-miracle, she remembered
it without fear.

"What if, after all, dreams sometimes came true?" The thought
quickened her breath, but not her feet. In the night she had fled from
a dream too poignant, but now she felt no impulse for flight. Rather,
she delayed her steps, thrilling as she recognized about her the
dream's landmarks.

For now there arose before Sheila's dazed eyes that rare and marvellous
phenomenon of a dream reproduced, at least in its physical aspects, by
reality. And in such an experience, given perhaps to one in a
thousand, it is the reality that seems to tremble--threatened by some
older and stronger truth--beneath one's feet. So it trembled now for
Sheila as she saw again those features in the face of the woods that
had impressed her sleep.

Here were the few rich leaves, fluttering lightly in the evening wind
as they had fluttered in her dreaming vision of them! And now her
heart fluttered with them, so much stranger than the dream itself was
its incredible repetition.

There--just ahead--yes, surely! there was the same long finger of pale
sunlight striking downward through the stripped trees! Presently she
would pass beneath its touch, feeling it faintly warm upon her
cheek--as she had felt it in her dream!

Afterwards would be the dusk. And then--_what if dreams came true_?

She was not afraid, but instinctively she drew nearer the boy beside
her. "Ted," she breathed, in an awed whisper.

"Huh?" he asked, roused from his own silent well-being.

But she did not answer, and he strode cheerfully on without troubling
himself to question her again. "What if dreams come true?" she was
saying within herself, but she could not, after all, put the thought
into words for Ted to scoff at.

And then, before she reached it, the finger of sunlight vanished and
the dusk was upon her, not swiftly billowing, but slipping softly
downward like a silken veil. She was not afraid, she told herself, but
the dusk chilled her and she shivered.

After the dusk--if dreams came true!--would be-- And then her heart
seemed to stop its beating. For dim in the distance, but coming toward
her through the trees, there walked a shadow. And even while she
watched, it gathered shape and substance unto itself; it ceased to be a
floating fragment of mist and became a woman!

But now Sheila's heart began to beat again--riotously. Her
hesitations, her unacknowledged fears, were succeeded by a sens