So sang a festive wedding-party as it went merrily arm in arm through the long high street of Passy, with a gleeful trust that would have filled the heart with envy but for sad experience of the vanity of human wishes. _Chacun chez nous!_ How charming it sounds! Was each so sure that when he reached his home he would find his heart's desire? Was the bridegroom himself so very sure? [Illustration: THE OLD WATER-RAT.] The heart's desire--the heart's regret! I flattered myself that I had pretty well sounded the uttermost depths of both on that eventful Sunday! Part Four [Illustration] I got back to my hotel in the Rue de la Michodiere. Prostrate with emotion and fatigue, the tarantella still jingling in my ears, and that haunting, beloved face, with its ineffable smile still printed on the retina of my closed eyes, I fell asleep. And then I dreamed a dream, and the first phase of my real, inner life began! All the events of the day, distorted and exaggerated and jumbled together after the usual manner of dreams, wove themselves into a kind of nightmare and oppression. I was on my way to my old abode: everything that I met or saw was grotesque and impossible, yet had now the strange, vague charm of association and reminiscence, now the distressing sense of change and loss and desolation. As I got near to the avenue gate, instead of the school on my left there was a prison; and at the door a little thick-set jailer, three feet high and much deformed, and a little deformed jaileress no bigger than himself, were cunningly watching me out of the corners of their eyes, and toothlessly smiling. Presently they began to waltz together to an old, familiar tune, with their enormous keys dangling at their sides; and they looked so funny that I laughed and applauded. But soon I perceived that their crooked faces were not really funny; indeed, they were fatal and terrible in the extreme, and I was soon conscious that these deadly dwarfs were trying to waltz between me and the avenue gate for which I was bound--to cut me off, that they might run me into the prison, where it was their custom to hang people of a Monday morning. In an agony of terror I made a rush for the avenue gate, and there stood the Duchess of Towers, with mild surprise in her eyes and a kind smile--a heavenly vision of strength and reality. "You are not dreaming true!" she said. "Don't be afraid--those little people don't exist! Give me your hand and come in here." And as I did so she waved the troglodytes away, and they vanished; and I felt that this was no longer a dream, but something else--some strange thing that had happened to me, some new life that I had woke up to.