Then he found himself in a house, in that house, among a fluttered group of school-teachers, who talked to him about the woman who had died. They took him for one of her family. He did not talk to them. He went up a stairway and into a room with faded flowers and tall candles ranged about a high bed like an altar. A dead woman lay there, with a sheet drawn over her face. He lifted the cloth and looked at her face and went away silently. _VI. The Confession._ It was queer, he knew, this impulse to confess that haunted him day and night. When she had been alive he had never wished to speak the words that might set him free to seek again the strange solace of her lips and arms. But now that she was for ever out of reach, he felt this mad compulsion to make known their shadowy love. To speak now would be to risk losing all the happiness he had built up for himself in the real world, out of an inexplicable loyalty to the memory of his dead playmate. But he could not think of such things now. He could think only of the dreamer who had decked a room for a beautiful adventure that did not come, and who sat in a garden waiting, wondering whether death would come before the adventure; and of a gate that swung open one moonlit night to make her dream come true, and of two adventurers happy for an uncalendared hour in the phantom world of fancy. The time would come, his reason urged, when this memory would be a thing remote and forgotten, when it would no longer hold for him even the ache of regret, when its pathos even would be faded, as its bright joys were already fading in his thoughts. He would be sorry to have spoken. He would know that he had been a fool to speak. But now, though he lost everything that would one day be dear to him again, he did not care. He fought against that mad impulse while he could. Then, lest he blurt the thing out suddenly, he began to plan the manner of his confession. He remembered a fantastic idea uttered that night by the story-writer and he thought, “It will be easier to tell it to her first as a story.” And one evening he told her the story. He began haltingly enough, constrained as he was to present to her imagination these two nameless figures of a man and a woman who had wished rashly for a happiness not to be had within the solid confines of reality; but as he talked, he forgot all else, and his confession became a passionate vindication of the rights of that phantom self for which the workaday world has so little use, and which can achieve only a pitiful and momentary freedom in what the world calls folly. Then, for he had come to the end of his tale, in that picture of a room with its faded flowers and spent candles and a face whose eyes were no longer bright with wild dreams, abruptly he ceased speaking. And it seemed to him that even without as yet naming himself, he had confessed his crime of secret rebellion against the wisdom of the world.