They both laughed. Then Meynell's face set sharply. A sudden recollection shot through his mind. He beheld the figure of a sallow, dark-haired young man slipping--alone--through the doorway of the green drawing-room. And this image in the mind touched and fired others, like a spark running through dead leaves.... * * * * * When he had gone, Catharine turned to Mary, and Mary, running, wound her arms close round her mother, and lay her head on Catharine's breast. "You angel!--you darling!" she said, and raising her mother's hand she kissed it passionately. Catharine's eyes filled with tears, and her heart with mingled joy and revolt. Then, quickly, she asked herself as she stood there in her child's embrace whether she should speak of a certain event--certain experience--which had, in truth, though Mary knew nothing of it, vitally affected both their lives. But she could not bring herself to speak of it. So that Mary never knew to what, in truth, she owed the painful breaking down of an opposition and a hostility which might in time have poisoned all their relations to each other. But when Mary had gone away to change her damp clothes, the visionary experience of which Catharine could not tell came back upon her; and again she felt the thrill--the touch of bodiless ecstasy. It had been in the early morning, when all such things befall. For then the mind is not yet recaptured by life and no longer held by sleep. There is in it a pure expectancy, open to strange influences: influences from memory and the under-soul. It visualizes easily, and dream and fact are one. In this state Catharine woke on a September morning and felt beside her a presence that held her breathless. The half-remembered images and thoughts of sleep pursued her--became what we call "real." "Robert!" she said, aloud--very low. And without voice, it seemed to her that some one replied. A dialogue began into which she threw her soul. Of her body, she was not conscious; and yet the little room, its white ceiling, its open windows, and the dancing shadows of the autumn leaves were all present to her. She poured out the sorrow, the anxiety--about Mary--that pressed so heavy on her heart, and the tender voice answered, now consoling, now rebuking. "And we forbade him, because he followed not us ... Forbid him not--_forbid him not_!"--seemed to go echoing through the quiet air. The words sank deep into her sense--she heard herself sobbing--and the unearthly presence came nearer--though still always remote, intangible--with the same baffling distance between itself and her....