"So that although I heard afar that the Signore and yourself came to high words on this subject, and gathered that you had departed in wrath to seek shelter with an aunt, I thought of this dissension as one that would soon be forgotten, and a matter of the past. The more so that your Signore's own words to his friends reassured me; to whom he said more than once that you would be the best woman in the world but for a defect I did not understand from his description, that when you flew into a blooming rage you could not keep your hair on, but that it wouldn't last and you would be back in a week, because you knew he couldn't do without you. He set my mind at rest by treating the idea of any lasting breach between you as something too absurd for speech. But I tell you this for certain, that I saw all that passed between him and _la Sera_, and that if you are keeping your resentment alive with the thought that he was guilty of anything but an ill-judged joke, you are doing grievous injustice to him as well as yourself. Return to him, Signora, forthwith; and beware henceforward of foolish jealousy and needless quarrels!" The foregoing is a much more complete version of what the photograph seemed to say than Mrs. Aiken's fragmentary report to her cousin. She had not Mr. Pelly's extraordinary memory, and, moreover, she had to omit phrases and even sentences that were given in Italian. Miss Volumnia Bax, when not interrupting, checked off the narrative with nods at intervals, each nod seeming to be fraught with confirmed foresight of the preceding instalment. When it ended, she launched at once, without a moment's pause, into a well-considered judgment, or rather abstract of a Report of the Case, which her mind was already scheming, to read at the next meeting of the Psychomorphic. This Report, printed recently by the Society, containing all that Miss Volumnia said to her cousin on first hearing the tale, as well as many valuable remarks, commences as follows: "Case 54103A. Dream or Pseudodream, reported by Miss Volumnia Bax. The subject of this experience, whom we will call Mrs. A., is reluctant to admit that she was not awake when it happened, however frequently the absurdity of this view is pointed out to her. So strong is this impression that if other members of her family had been subject to hallucination or insanity, or even victims of alcoholism, we should incline to place this case in some corresponding class. As it is, we have nothing but the word of the narrator to warrant our assigning it a place outside ordinary Somnistic Phenomena." This story is not answerable for the technical phrases of what is, after all, merely a suburban Research Society. The Report goes on to give, very fairly, the incident as already narrated, and concludes thus: