“Yes, this is the hand that has been around me in the darkness, when I have shuddered in my dreams.” “It is wonderful,” said Northcote, “that you should know that you will be able to lean upon me.” “I know what your voice is like also, although it is so vague and distant to me now. I know the words it will speak to-morrow, when it asks them to be merciful. I know that all I have seen in my dreams will take place.” “It must be a grievous thing to go to sleep in a prison,” said Northcote, uttering a half-formed thought without consideration of his words. “Or perhaps it is more dreadful to awaken in one.” “The going to sleep and the awakening are not so terrible as the dreams that come. That in which I saw you first, in which I first heard your voice, in which I first touched the hand that will deliver me, was most dreadful in its nature. My weak mind fell down under it. I think I could not live through such a vision again.” “How strange are these visitations!” said Northcote. “How awful, how mysterious! When did this dream come to you?” “Last night about the hour of ten; the first time I had closed my eyes for three days.” Northcote recoiled with a shudder. The precision of the voice and the power of the coincidence were overmastering. “There is no accounting for these things,” he said, in a voice throbbing with excitement. “At the same hour I also had a strange, an almost terrible sort of vision.” “Yes, my deliverer, you have been called into my life to save it--to save that life which never had a perfect thought until it was brought into prison. It did not know what the trees and the sky were, nor the air and the birds; never had it heard a deep voice nor touched a strong hand. You are he that leaped out of the vast multitude that mocked me in my dream, he who stood up before it, and, with a great voice that sounded like the waves of the sea, caused them all to break and run. They grew afraid of your words and your looks, and they fled in terror. Yes, my life has become so full of beauty and meaning, so full of a spacious mystery, that I cannot believe it is to be taken away.” These words, breathed rather than spoken, sounded in the ear of Northcote as those of a transcendent sanity. Remote as they were, they yet appeared divinely appropriate to the time and place. But they left only one course for him to follow. He must detach himself from the unhappy speaker of them; he must flee her presence. Their edge was too keen. There would be no advocacy on the morrow if he yielded to the subtle enervation of this atmosphere. The voice pierced him like a passion, yet his veins had grown sluggish and heavy, as if under the influence of a drug. XXI THE TALISMAN WHICH TRANSCENDS EXPERIENCE