"Well, I thought myself the most unhappy woman alive, and wrapped myself up in my affection for my much-afflicted little son; and as I held him to my breast, and vainly tried to warm and mesmerize him into feeling and intelligence, Gogo came back into my heart, and I was forever thinking, 'Oh, if I had a son like Gogo what a happy woman I should be!' and pitied Madame Pasquier for dying and leaving him so soon, for I had just begun to dream true, and had seen Gogo and his sweet mother once again. "And then one night--one never-to-be-forgotten night--I went to Lady Gray's concert, and saw you standing in a corner by yourself; and I thought, with a leap of my heart, 'Why, that must be Gogo, grown dark, and with a beard and mustache like a Frenchman!' But alas, I found that you were only a Mr. Ibbetson, Lady Cray's architect, whom she had asked to her house because he was 'quite the handsomest young man she had ever seen!' "You needn't laugh. You looked very nice, I assure you! "Well, Mr. Ibbetson, although you were not Gogo, you became suddenly so interesting to me that I never forgot you--you were never quite out of my mind. I wanted to counsel and advise you, and take you by the hand, and be an elder sister to you, for I felt myself already older than you in the world and its ways. I wanted to be twenty years older still, and to have you for my son. I don't know _what_ I wanted! You seemed so lonely, and fresh, and unspotted from the world, among all those smart worldlings, and yet so big and strong and square and invincible--oh, so strong! And then you looked at me with such sincere and sweet and chivalrous admiration and sympathy--there, I cannot speak of it--and then you were _so_ like what Gogo might have become! Oh, you made as warm and devoted a friend of me at first sight as any one might desire! "And at the same time you made me feel so self-conscious and shy that I dared not ask to be introduced to you--I, who scarcely know what shyness is. "Dear Giulia Grisi sang '_Sedut' al Pie d' un' Salice,' and that tune has always been associated in my mind with your tongue ever since, and always will be. Your dear mother used to play it on the harp. Do you remember? "Then came that extraordinary dream, which you remember as well as I do: _wasn't_ it a wonder? You see, my dear father had learned a strange secret of the brain--how in sleep to recall past things and people and places as they had once been seen or known by him--even unremembered things. He called it 'dreaming true,' and by long practice, he told me, he had brought the art of doing this to perfection. It was the one consolation of his troubled life to go over and over again in sleep all his happy youth and childhood, and the few short years he had spent with his beloved young wife. And before he died, when he saw I had become so unhappy that life seemed to have no longer any possible hope of pleasure for me, he taught me his very simple secret.