‘Yes――so now.... But I know you, for all that――the sound of your voice even, the way you speak and stand there.’ ‘I only came back this morning. I do not think you were here before Christmas.’ Graham shook his head. ‘It was not here,’ he murmured. Then suddenly gathering courage, and with his eyes half closed: ‘It was far away ... in a garden.... Oh, I can’t tell you ... I can’t, unless you help me.... It slips from me so quickly.... When I try to reach it, it fades from me, though I know it is still there ... there, somewhere’――he smiled a little timidly. ‘Do you wonder what I am talking about?... I am only trying to remember a dream――a dream I have had so often.’ ‘And _I_ have something to do with it?’ ‘Oh yes; everything’――he spoke quietly, simply. ‘You were always there, you know. It belongs to you as much as it belongs to me. You have been meeting me there for years!’ There was that in his voice which made Brocklehurst, with exquisite tact, look carefully away from him. ‘I don’t quite follow you,’ he said softly. ‘I don’t think I quite know what you mean.’ ‘My meaning is only that,’ Graham replied; ‘only what I have just told you.’ He paused as if trying to make it out more clearly for himself. ‘Don’t _you_ sometimes dream?’ he asked. ‘Yes, of course.’ ‘Well! has it never seemed to you that there must be another world than this we are living in now?――a world outside this, I mean, but still a real world?’ ‘A dreamland?’ ‘Call it what you like. Yes――a dreamland. But while we are there, you know, _it_ is the real world, there is no other.’ Brocklehurst looked at him curiously. ‘But you don’t believe that, do you?’ ‘Yes, I believe it――or I used to believe it. There is something about it in the _Theætetus_ of Plato.’ ‘You have read Plato?’ ‘Only a little. I used to read him with my father.’ ‘And that is where you got your idea?’ ‘Oh no; I have always had it. It has been like a part of my life.... You see my dreams are rather peculiar ... I go back in them always to the same place――this garden――and I carry the memory of one life with me into the other.... Do you understand now? I can’t put it any plainer, because I am a little confused myself. Some day it may become clearer, and I may be able to tell you better.’ ‘Well!――till then――――’ and Brocklehurst drew himself up on to the wall and drummed with his heels against the stones. ‘Till then?’ ‘Do you talk in this way to every one?’ ‘You mean I had better not? How should I talk to other people, when even you do not understand me?’ The other boy was silent. He was thinking. ‘What was I like?’ he asked presently――‘in your dreams, I mean?’ Then quickly, and before his companion could reply, ‘No; you need not tell me.’ ‘You do not care for me to talk to you in this way?’ Graham questioned half sadly, and with a strange feeling of loneliness creeping over him. ‘You were beautiful,’ he whispered under his breath; ‘more beautiful than any one I have ever seen.’