I was still holding the duchess's hand, and felt the warmth of it through her glove; it stole up my arm like a magnetic current. I was in Elysium; a heavenly sense had come over me that at last my periphery had been victoriously invaded by a spirit other than mine--a most powerful and beneficent spirit. There was a blessed fault in my impenetrable armor of self, after all, and the genius of strength and charity and loving-kindness had found it out. "Now you're dreaming true," she said. "Where are those boys going?" "To church, to make their _premiere communion_," I replied. "That's right. You're dreaming true because I've got you by the hand. Do you know that tune?" I listened, and the words belonging to it came out of the past and I said them to her, and she laughed again, with her eyes screwed up deliciously. "Quite right--quite!" she exclaimed. "How odd that you should know them! How well you pronounce French for an Englishman! For you are Mr. Ibbetson, Lady Cray's architect?" I assented, and she let go my hand. The street was full of people--familiar forms and faces and voices, chatting together and looking down the road after the yellow omnibus; old attitudes, old tricks of gait and manner, old forgotten French ways of speech--all as it was long ago. Nobody noticed us, and we walked up the now deserted avenue. The happiness, the enchantment of it all! Could it be that I was dead, that I had died suddenly in my sleep, at the hotel in the Rue de la Michodiere! Could it be that the Duchess of Towers was dead too--had been killed by some accident on her way from St. Cloud to Paris? and that, both having died so near each other, we had begun our eternal afterlife in this heavenly fashion? That was too good to be true, I reflected; some instinct told me that this was not death, but transcendent earthly life--and also, alas! that it would not endure forever! I was deeply conscious of every feature in her face, every movement of her body, every detail of her dress--more so then I could have been in actual life--and said to myself, "Whatever this is, it is no dream." But I felt there was about me the unspeakable elation which can come to us only in our waking moments when we are at our very best; and then only feebly, in comparison with this, and to many of us never, ft never had to me, since that morning when I had found the little wheelbarrow. I was also conscious, however, that the avenue itself had a slight touch of the dream in it. It was no longer quite right, and was getting out of drawing and perspective, so to speak. I had lost my stay--the touch of her hand. "Are you still dreaming true, Mr. Ibbetson?" "I am afraid not quite," I replied. "You must try by yourself a little--try hard. Look at this house; what is written on the portico?" I saw written in gold letters the words, "Tete Noire," and said so. [Illustration]